Addressing technical challenges of a European federation of Digital Innovation Hubs: the example of EUHubs4Data project

The project will implement a global catalogue of assets with a local perspective, taking into account service combinations and data sovereignity.

According to the DIH catalogue of the European Commission, over 200 European Digital innovation Hubs (out of some 350) specialize in data-related services, such as data mining, big data, or database management.

The EUHubs4data project focuses on federating European DIHs, starting from the 12 initial members of the project, with more hubs to be onboarded during the project. Each DIH has its own portfolio of data-driven services (such as data infrastructure, Big Data analytics, AI tools, technical support, and business consultancy) as well as datasets, which are offered mainly to their local markets.

This catalogue will allow the DIHs of the federation to expand their service and data offerings, and will give the possibility to SMEs to access services and data not available locally, hence boosting their innovation and competitiveness.

Natalie Cernecka and Andrea Manzi give an overview of the session they organize at the Data Week 

Building such a federation presents multiple challenges: governance, business, and also technical. For example, how to make service descriptions homogeneous and easily searchable in the federated catalogue? How to ensure service compatibility? what to do about data management across the federation, and how to harmonize and standardize datasets?

During the session, which will take place on 26 May at 4PM CET, we will first address the initial steps taken to unify the offering of assets and the catalogue design, and discuss the technical challenges we have been facing, such as heterogeneity of service description, interoperability, or service delivery framework. We will then focus on the plans and activities to build a real federation, by implementing both service and data interoperability between DIHs.

The aspects of data privacy and protection will also be addressed, as well as our roadmap to include in the catalogue the services and datasets coming from new DIH that will join the federation and also the data brought by and generated by the SMEs participating in the project Open Calls.

Join usto the Data Week event here , add the session to your personal agenda and be part of the discussion. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!