Building Trust in Agri-Food Data Spaces: Lessons from Slovenia's Pomurje Region

How do you get farmers, processors, public institutions, and environmental agencies to share data, when competitive sensitivity, power asymmetries, and data sovereignty concerns stand in the way? In Slovenia's Pomurje region, the DIH AGRIFOOD Data Space (DADS) has been answering that question in practice, as part of the Horizon Europe DATA4FOOD project and in direct collaboration with the DS2 project.

The Slovenian use case within DS2 focuses on air quality monitoring across the agri-food production landscape. Agricultural activity contributes significantly to local air quality conditions through emissions from livestock, field management practices, and processing operations. Yet the data needed to understand these patterns sits in silos: farm management systems, environmental agency monitoring networks, IoT sensor deployments, and public registries that do not talk to each other. Advancing air quality insight requires connecting these sources in a way that participants can trust.

The Technical Layer: DSX Engine

DADS is built on DSX Engine, developed by the University of Maribor, which uses Eclipse Dataspace Components framework and power of extensions of the EDC. Three decentralisation features address the trust gap directly. The Decentralised Discovery Extension (DDE) uses Ethereum-based smart contracts to create a blockchain-based connector registry, eliminating central points of failure in participant discovery. The Decentralised Clearing House (DCH) records every data transaction as an immutable event on the EduCTX/Hyperledger Besu network, providing tamper-proof audit trails without relying on any single authority. Ethereum-based Decentralised Identifiers (Ethr DID) enable self-sovereign identity management, so organisations control their own credentials without depending on centralised certificate authorities.

The Governance Layer: SITRA Rulebook 3.0

Technical sovereignty alone is insufficient. DADS adapts the SITRA Rulebook 3.0 to the agricultural context through a participatory multi-stakeholder study group involving farmers, processors, technology providers, academic partners, and public institutions. The resulting governance framework establishes data sovereignty principles, ODRL-based usage control policies, fair benefit-sharing mechanisms, and clear dispute resolution pathways, translating EU Data Governance Act requirements into rules that small-scale producers and local authorities can actually work with.

Results and Replication

The platform connects producers, processors, environmental agencies, government ministries, and civil society organisations under a single governed infrastructure. A graduated participation model accommodates actors across the full range of digital maturity. DSX Engine components have already been tested by different projects, while the governance adaptation methodology has been aligned with different European use cases. The lesson for cross-sector data spaces: technical interoperability and governance legitimacy must be built in parallel. Neither alone is sufficient, but together they turn data sharing from a risk into a measurable public benefit.