Transforming Data Spaces: DS2 at Data Space Symposium 2025 in Warsaw

From left to right: Dr. Gerald Ristow (SAG) and Dr. Juha-Pekka Soinined (VTT) - Coordinator of DS2 project

This year’s Data Spaces Symposium, organized by the Data Spaces Support Center (DSSC), was held in Warsaw. More than 800 participants attended this two-days event which demonstrated the benefits of data spaces and how they can be made inter-operable.

Highlights

• Many success stories

• Technical sessions to explains DSSC offerings

• Good networking opportunities

The conference opened with statements from the founding members of the Data Spaces Business Alliances, namely BDVA, Fiware, Gaia-X and IDSA who’s goal is to accelerate business transformation in the data economy. Many successful data ecosystems were presented and an interesting topic was to see data space as possible enablers for AI, especially LLMs. The line of thought is that AI needs data and data space can provide it!

One of the three tracks, which ran for half of the conference, was organized by the DSSC and focused on how to set up a data space and make it successful. In a role play different stakeholders came together to discuss if and how a data space should open up to other use cases. The audience was heavily involved and even got to represent the platform operator! What the audience learned was that the technology is not the issue but rather to convince the stakeholders about the added benefits of participating in a data space.

Panel at Data Spaces Symposium 2025

Several sessions were dedicated to the question on how to make data spaces interoperable. For this the DSSC presented its new version 2.0 of the Blueprint which shows and explains the building blocks that are needed to build a successful data space. In addition, the DSSC hosts a web page called Toolbox where the available tools are listed, including their licensing conditions. A very illustrating talk on the inter-operability topic of data spaces was given by Ms. Gabriella Laatikainen from VTT.

Ms. Gabriella Laatikainen from VTT on Cross-data Space Interoperability

Takeaways

• The technology for building data spaces is available

• Explaining the benefits of data spaces is still a big challenge

• The DSSC provides guidance on how to build a data space and which tools are already available

More photos and the presentations from the event will be available on the website: here

Written by Gerald Ristow (SAG)