Task & challenge

More efficient administrative processes, better services or new business models: It has long been recognized that sharing data across organizational boundaries offers immense opportunities - for companies as well as for public institutions. Data silos and critical trust, confidentiality and security concerns often stand in the way of trustful data sharing.

Data sharing among different stakeholders on a global scale remains elusive due to a number of technical, organizational, economic and legal challenges for both data providers and users: These challenges range from expensive and unsustainable proprietary solutions and security concerns over centralized cloud platforms, to insufficient quality, interoperability, and maintenance of shared data. Last but not least, there may be difficulties in licensing data and measuring its value, as well as in dealing with data catalogues and contractual terms, that are not easily understandable by the involved users.

Approach & technical implementation

PISTIS is “Promoting and Incentivising Federated, Trusted, Fair Sharing and Trading of Interoperable Data Assets”. To this end, 31 European project partners from eleven countries bring forward a reference federated data sharing, trading and monetisation platform for secure, trusted and controlled exchange and usage of proprietary data assets and data-driven intelligence. Fraunhofer FOKUS is coordinating the project, which will run until June 2026.

PISTIS will offer a modular environment, that can be used jointly or autonomously. It allows users of existing data spaces to complement their services with the novelties of PISTIS without forcing them to abandon existing services of value they are already using. At the same time, the PISTIS Network is an ecosystem of services operating locally in each data space deployment. Therefore, no data leaves the premises of a data owner during the steps of data preparation and analysis. Only metadata is stored in global metadata catalogues. This will create a distributed network of existing and new data spaces with built-in governance brought by PISTIS. Open APIs and standardized components will ensure seamless connection and compliance with other data spaces, especially GAIA-X.

PISTIS will establish the methodological and technical foundations across different axes:

• PISTIS Federated Data Management, Interoperability & Governance: aiming at collecting, curating securing and fully controlling the data made available through each organisation’s data space. The interoperability, quality and certification of the data is guaranteed and systematically checked.

• PISTIS Federated, Secure Data Sharing: concerning the effective management and on-chain storage of (multi-party) data contracts in an understandable manner as well as the secure peer-to-peer data transfer. Monitoring mechanisms ensure that data sets are provided and retrieved in accordance with the contractually agreed provisions.

• PISTIS Data Valuation and Monetisation: systematically articulating and recommending an appropriate target value. Data at all levels may be thus containerised into shareable, tradeable and trackable assets.

• PISTIS Data Sharing Skills Cultivation: providing the training material to educate stakeholders into how they can assess their data sharing maturity, proceed with data, deploy and operate PISTIS technologies and implement a sustainable data sharing strategy.

The business unit Digital Public Services (DPS) at Fraunhofer-Institute FOKUS designs and develops the PISTIS data spaces and trusted data management services. In particular, DPS is responsible for the development of the data catalogue. This catalogue is based on PIVEAU, a software developed at DPS for the preparation, integration, publication and cataloguing of data.

PISTIS will be tested and validated in real-life settings in three large-scale demonstrators’ hubs in Greece (Mobility and Urban Planning), Spain (Energy), Austria and Germany (Automotive). The mobility and urban planning demonstrator hub in Greece will focus on facilitating data trading and sharing amongst stakeholders of different sectors (aviation, public transports and public administration) – to improve baggage handling management, transfer passenger management or public transportation planning. In Spain, the energy demonstrator hub will focus on ensuring the resilient operation of the distribution grid. The automotive demonstrator hub in Germany and Austria will support data-driven solutions and services designed to contribute to environmentally friendly and efficient mobility and transport – for example with regard to corporate mobility management for green driving or urban emission modelling.

All project partners are listed below: