Industrial data ecosystems and data spaces

Industrial data ecosystems are inter-organizational forms of cooperation emerging around sharing data. They arise from a digital infrastructure, giving data providers and data users a platform to share and (re-)use data. Data spaces are among the digital infrastructures frequently associated with data ecosystems, as they supply a shared digital space for its participants to share data in a sovereign way. Data spaces aim to close a gap in the digital infrastructure landscape, addressing concerns of organizations when sharing data, such as data misappropriation or a lack of control of shared data. They do this by implementing data sovereignty - typically through Usage Control Policies - that give data providers the means to formalize semantically and technically how data users are allowed to use their data. In this fundamentals article, we address the following issues: (1) contextualizing and demarcating data spaces and data ecosystems, (2) systematizing data spaces in the research and policy landscape, and (3) elaborating on a research agenda for Information Systems (IS) research.