Culture Data Space: A Case Study in Federated Data Ecosystems

In several national and even continental data strategies worldwide, the decentralized data space concept aims to address concerns of data sovereignty among organizations. A significant number of projects and a few already operational data spaces address application domains in industrial domains such as manufacturing, mobility and logistics, or health. However, data sovereignty has also become a key concern of artists and cultural institutions who are pursuing the two-pronged and sometimes conflicting goals of creating added value from data sharing, and protecting their intellectual property and personal privacy rights. Additional challenges of this sector include an orders-of-magnitude larger number of potential players compared to existing data spaces, frequently limited IT capabilities, a complex differentiated system of data types and regulations, and a novel interplay between heterogeneous data integration and analytics with human creativity, among many others. Also, the different evolution paths of the involved sub-communities require a sophisticated concept for federated data space evolution. This keynote talk reports experiences of the”Data Space Culture”, a lighthouse project of the German Chancellors Office aiming at investigating these issues and demonstrating and evaluating a suitable data ecosystem around four use cases in the fields of theaters, museums, music training, and networking local culture communities. We also discuss the potential synergies and interoperation challenges with the many other culture digitization initiatives in Europe and beyond.