Data Process & Technological Bricks for expanding digital value creation in European Data Spaces

Project Information

DataBri-X

Grant agreement ID: 101070069

DOI

10.3030/101070069

Project closed

EC signature date 20 June 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2025

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

€ 5 720 924,00

EU contribution

€ 4 687 489,99

Coordinated by

ATHINA-EREVNITIKO KENTRO KAINOTOMIAS STIS TECHNOLOGIES TIS PLIROFORIAS, TON EPIKOINONION KAI TIS GNOSIS
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DataBri-X (Data Process & Technological Bricks for expanding digital value creation in European Data Spaces)

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

DataBri-X developed and provided a holistic, energy-efficient and user-friendly data management toolbox of practical, robust and scalable bricks (process, technologies and tools) that improve the interoperability, usability, discoverability quality, and integrity of data and metadata, with the aim of making datasets ready for expanded digital value creation in the context of European Data Spaces. The DataBri-X Toolbox, offered in compliance with accountability, fairness, privacy, and confidentiality regulations as well as FAIR principles, fosters collaboration, build on existing and emerging initiatives and support business, public, research and citizen data management needs.
DataBri-X adopted a multifaceted approach to establish its technical underpinnings. A unified architecture was designed to encompass not only the individual tools themselves, but also communication protocols, workflow modelling functionalities, and the governance framework. This overarching design facilitated seamless integration with external data spaces, enabling efficient data exchange and collaboration. Project requirements, extracted from the use cases, guided the development process, ensuring each technical component directly addressed user needs.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To mitigate the shortcomings of traditional waterfall life cycle approaches DataBri-X follows the JenPlane Data Governance approach. This approach describes the data lifecycle like a plane instead of a cycle, which introduces a highly iterative and flexible lifecycle model. JenPlane is enabling users to select the most appropriate, energy- efficient and complementary combination of tools for their data management activities. The JenPlane Process Designer & Composer answer the challenge of tool selection, collaboration & orchestration and cater for the need of, semi-automatic deployment, execution, and orchestration of data intensive projects. As such, the JenPlane approach provides the assurance of a consistent and coherent execution plan for the tools most suited for the data management activities of a variety of end-users, thus securing the usability and end-user friendliness of the toolbox. The JenPlane process is based on the DataBri-X KG, that includes on the one hand all relevant attributes of a data lifecycle process and on the other hand a set of additional attributes relevant for a data management project (e.g. license information, energy efficiency, available AI models etc.). Innovative pathways of DataBri-X are the development of a DataBri-X Data Governance Process Designer & Composer that allows the flexible composition of a customised data project that triggers the deployment of a DataBri-X Toolbox instance ready to be deployed and along end user needs.
Recognizing the importance of responsible and secure data handling, DataBri-X established a comprehensive governance process. This process, modelled and implemented using ontologies and semantic web technologies, effectively defines, enforces, and guides governance rules. To enhance user experience, a web application with a visual interface built on JenPlane technology was integrated with the governance process. This user-friendly interface empowers users to tailor governance processes to their specific needs.
DataBri-X incorporated a recommendation engine (initial work) within the web application to assist users in selecting the most appropriate tools for their tasks. This intelligent system leverages the DataBri-X tool repository, suggesting tools based on user-defined optimization objectives. Users can specify their priorities, such as energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, or processing speed, and the engine recommends tools and services that best align with these preferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

DataBri-X mainly addresses three areas where the project will provide innovation and clearly advance the State-of-the-Art: (i) Data Spaces, Datamarkets and related technologies, (ii) Data Governance and the Data- Lifecycle approach, and (iii) Data- and Metadata Management.
DataBri-X will develop a seamless integrated and interoperable data management toolbox that can be easily configured along a flexible data governance process following the specific requirements of a data-intense project. The toolbox allows to specify the relevant steps along a data lifecycle (e.g. acquire - discover - analyse), and assembles and deploys a subset of the available software tools accordingly that can be installed easily via virtualisation / containerisation and that is following existing standards, provides a resource loader to load and use third party resources like AI models, domain specific vocabularies and language resources and consists of open source and/or commercial tools depending on the end user needs. Data Spaces, datamarkets, data portals / catalogues or Digital Hubs, but also other commercial or non-commercial data sharing and -management activities will be equipped with a flexible and easy to use toolbox by combining and improving existing software tools into an integrated solution, which allows new scalable business models for the DataBri-X partners.
Partners have participated in several lighthouse activities around Data Spaces as IDS, DMA, TRusts, SSHOC, ELG and others and are active in the field of standardisation.
Innovative pathways of DataBri-X are: the development of existing data and metadata management tools from different TRLs to TRL 8, and the seamless integration of these tools into the DataBri- X Toolbox that can be customised along a flexible Data Governance process and thereby specific needs and easily deployed into Data Spaces as well as also for other data management purposes.

DataBri-X Toolbox Architecture

DataBri-X Workflow Creation

DataBri-X Conceptual Model