AD4GD

AD4GD: Easing the international data exchange across organizations with interoperability

Project timeline: Sep. 2022 – Aug. 2025

Funding: € 4.13 M from the EU funding program Horizon 2020

Partners: 12 partners in eight countries

Project coordinator: Centro de Investigación Ecológica y Aplicaciones Forestales (CREAF)

Tasks of FIT: Stakeholder analysis and requirement elicitation from a user’s perspective, design and implementation of user interfaces in the dataspace

The project AllData4GreenDeal (AD4GD) aims to improve the international collaboration in targeting ecological problems by identifying possible hindrances in data exchange and contributing to standard-based services in the dataspace.

The environment and a sustainable development are among Europe's most important priorities, which all stakeholders and decision makers from business, politics, and society must address. Today, numerous data about the environment is already being collected through measurements by experts and (citizen) scientists or observations from satellites. IoT-based technologies are increasingly being used for this purpose. However, the collected data is still structured differently and varies in quality. These differences result in the challenge of combining and making such datasets interoperable.

Another problem is the lack of an integrated data access: To fully make use of the available data and promote the development of intelligent scientific services and applications to support decision-making processes in emergency situations, the data must become more accessible on the international level.

Green-Deal dataspace: Creating a unified dataspace

A Green-Deal dataspace must meet the technological requirements to transform the collected data into highly usable and reliable information for scientific services. This resonates with the European Commission’s announcement “Towards a shared European dataspace” from 2018, which focuses on a seamless digital space. This space enables the development of new products and services based on data.

AD4GD’s overriding goal is to shape the European Green-Deal dataspace as an open hub for FAIR Data and standard-based services that support the main priorities of biodiversity, climate change, circular economy, deforestation, and pollution. The FAIR principles stand for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. They aim to prepare and store data sustainably, so that others can reuse them. Interoperability concepts that close semantic and technological gaps that currently hinder stakeholders and fields of application from accessing multidisciplinary data, processing services and processing platforms will be in focus of the project.

The concept of AD4GD supports the idea of open-source and the interoperability of dataspaces for cross-institutional and international cooperation in tackling climate change and environmental issues. This approach requires the capture of all useful information and international collaboration.

Lastly, the project aims to identify and resolve possible hindrances that limit the collective usage of data between institutions. Furthermore, AD4GD intends to facilitate the cross-organizational data exchange between European institutions and international organizations like WMO, GEO and the system of the United Nations (UN).

Fraunhofer FIT in AD4DG

Pursuing a co-design approach, the consortium intends to work closely with all stakeholders in order to satisfy the needs of the involved parties, citizen scientists, as well as the international cooperation. This is how the base of the dataspace is intended to be jointly designed. Fraunhofer FIT will lead the user-centered approach throughout the project. FIT will also define the requirements, design, and implement the user interface of the AD4GD platform to ensure an ideal user experience.