Data Spaces in Agriculture

Data and digital services increasingly play an important and critical role in many use cases of the agrifood sector. While more and more data is being made available by data producers, a growing number of data consumers are building use cases and services based on such data and agricultural processes. Major challenges in such a context are how to interconnect data producers with consumers, how to achieve data interoperability, and how to maintain data sovereignty. In this paper, we first discuss specific challenges and demands arising from the status quo of the digital domain ecosystem in agriculture and its respective data spaces. This is followed by an introduction and brief overview of approaches for data space architectures, their typical characteristics, and actual industry-driven initiatives and research projects. Finally, we discuss a specific approach that relies on digital twins for agricultural assets and which aims at centralizing access to data in a decentralized digital domain ecosystem. The presented concepts offer a potential way to tackle the aforementioned challenges for the agricultural data space.