Sun and Dataspaces: Three Days in Nice

In May, Digiotouch hosted the seventh plenary meeting of DS2 in Nice, bringing the consortium together for three days of demonstrations, working sessions and some refreshingly direct conversations about what still needs to be finished. DS2 is a Horizon Europe project with 17 partners, coordinated by VTT, building the first modular toolkit for connecting data spaces across industry sectors, so that data sharing between, say, a city administration and an agricultural platform is secure, sovereign and compliant by default rather than by exception.

Day 1: where the modules stand

ICE and ATIT opened by setting the objectives for the week, including a walk-through of the reviewer comments, and the Board of Partners met before lunch. The centre of gravity was a 60-minute module status session framed entirely around validation: not “is the feature built” but “can it be demonstrated, measured and signed off”. For us in Digiotouch that meant reporting on the security and multi-cloud side of the Inter-sectoral Data Space Toolkit, covering authentication and access control, audit logging, and the data transfer and caching layer that sits between the connectors and the underlying cloud providers. The afternoon shifted to the use cases, with ATIT presenting City Scape, ITC on Green Deal and UTH on Precision Agriculture. The day closed with a working dinner.

Day 2: end to end, not module by module

ICE opened with a SWAT demonstration, and that led into the most useful session of the meeting: a workshop that took each use case through the whole workflow rather than testing components in isolation. Publishing a dataset, discovering it in the catalogue, negotiating a policy, transferring it, and afterwards being able to prove who did what, all run in sequence, with technical validation and the economic and societal benefits assessed side by side. City Scape, Green Deal, Precision Agriculture and the cross-cutting X Sector case each had their turn. An integration and deployment FAQ followed, which is where the unglamorous questions live: versions, endpoints, configuration. 21C then covered dissemination and communication, a publications check, and exploitation.

Day 3: policies and deadlines

The final morning began with VTT and UOS on the policy process supporting the use cases, and then the room got practical. Five deliverables are due in June 2026: D3.3 on data governance and methodology, D4.2 and D5.2 on the toolkit modules for data access and human-in-the-loop, D6.2 on the federated identity platform, and D7.3 on the joint sector and inter-sector pilots. Internal review deadlines were confirmed on the spot, which is usually the difference between a deliverable that gets reviewed properly and one that gets reviewed at midnight.

What we took away

Phase II is the point where DS2 stops being a collection of modules and starts behaving like a platform. The change in tone across the three days was noticeable: less about individual components, more about how they hold up together under real use-case conditions. Thanks to everyone who made the trip to Nice, and to the partners who kept a full agenda running on schedule.

Written by Digiotouch OÜ