Preparatory actions for the data space for Agriculture

Outcomes and deliverables

The coordination and support action will provide:

• An inventory of existing platforms sharing data relevant for agriculture (public and private);
• A proposed design approach based on scenarios with corresponding business models;
• A multi-stakeholder governance scheme specific to the sector;
• A blueprint for the data space including an architecture considering common building blocks;
• Interim results in due time to inform the development of the implementation action to be supported under the next Work Programme;
• Input to the work of the Data Spaces Support Centre.

The main objective is to develop a secure and trusted data space to enable the agriculture sector to transparently share and access data allowing for an increase in its economic and environmental performance. The space may also serve common good purposes (for more information on the scope of the data space, please see “A European Strategy for Data”, COM/2020/66 final). The data space is expected to facilitate the sharing, processing and analysis of production data, open data and possibly other public data (e.g. soil data). Production data supplemented by publicly held data will present new opportunities for monitoring and optimising the use of natural resources and will contribute to achieve the objectives of the Green Deal (including the Farm-to-Fork-Strategy; Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change) and the Common Agricultural Policy.

The project will explore possible options and conceptual approaches for the future deployment of this data space. Provisions for transparent control of data access and use, development of governance and business models for the data space are to be developed considering, among others, the evolving regulatory environment, cross-data-space elements, and experiences with the EU Code of Conduct on sharing agriculture data by contractual agreement. The development of the data space is expected to have a strong end-user orientation and to consider potential users, including farmers currently less using data-based solutions.

The action will engage the community of stakeholders involving at least associations acting at EU/multi-country level representing relevant stakeholders, and public administration and/or governmental bodies. The community of stakeholders is to involve farmers, machinery suppliers, and possibly other agri-business branches and farms advisors, and representatives from the ICT industry. Ideally, representatives of all Member States are involved.

In particular, the project will:

• Undertake an inventory of existing platforms sharing agricultural data,
• Take stock of experience gained with the above-mentioned Code of Conduct,
• Take stock of experiences gained with other types of data sharing as well as with data (set) generation in the private and public domains,
• Explore different possible design approaches for the data space(e.g. serving private data sharing and interests, serving private data sharing interests complemented by public data, serving private and public interests), and elaborate the advantages and disadvantages,
• Propose design/conceptual approaches, for the set-up of the data space, identify common essential elements and develop corresponding business models,
• Develop a multi-stakeholder governance scheme of the data space,
• Get broad consensus on the approach, governance, and business models.
• Develop a roadmap for the step-wise deployment of data space, including the identification of public and private data sets which are expected to particularly contribute to the objectives of the data space

The action will have to work in partnership with the Data Spaces Support Centre (see topic 2.2.2.1) in order to ensure alignment with the European Data Spaces Technical Framework and the rest of the ecosystem of data spaces in section 2.2.1 thereof. The joint work will target the definition of:

• the data space reference architecture, building blocks and common toolboxes to be used;
• the common standards, including semantic standards and interoperability protocols, both domain-specific and crosscutting;
• The data governance models, business models and strategies for running data spaces.

Furthermore, the project is encouraged to cooperate with Testing and Experimentation Facility for Agri-food (see section 2.3.2.3), to define European test and training data sets and to provide support in their establishment.