In the Gaia-X Hub Germany, the user perspective is represented by many companies and experts. Hub members are organised in the following domain working groups:
- Agriculture
- Energy
- Finance
- Geoinformation
- Health
- Industry 4.0/SME
- Mobility
- Public Sector
- Smart City/Smart Region
- Smart Living
It is the explicit goal to expand the scope to further domain working groups that reflect the potential of a sovereign data infrastructure in industry, science, and society.
Members of the Gaia-X Hub Germany gather, analyse, and evaluate use cases to consolidate requirements towards Gaia-X. Moreover, use cases illustrate the need for and the added benefit of a sovereign European data infrastructure. All use cases that have been verified so far are available online in the use case gallery. Everyone interested in shaping the future of the European Digital Economy is invited to contribute.
The Gaia-X Hub Germany contributes to the goals of the European data strategy, especially regarding the development of European data spaces and ecosystems. In addition, it supports the user side in the development of use cases and contributes to the scaling of the Gaia-X services. It supports the establishment and further development of a sovereign data infrastructure based on Federation Services and Policy Rules & Standards. The local Gaia-X actors can network within the Gaia-X Hub Germany and are supported in their endeavours to promote a sovereign data infrastructure.
Who we are
+850
Members
+425
Organisations
10
Domain Working
Groups
+65
Use Cases
Domain Working Groups within the Gaia-X Hub Germany
Agriculture
An enormous digitalization effort is underway in the agri-food sector. Agricultural and horticultural companies produce an enormous number of products every day, but more and more also a mass of data. But available data are only valuable when shared. Therefore, throughout the entire chain from field to fork, traditional supply companies such as machinery constructors and agrochemists, and new players are positioning themselves on this subject, as the data economy constitutes a new growth driver for them. They are deploying digital tools and new data-driven applications, aiming as end-user not only farmers or AgriFood business, but also the consumers. To scale up and to make optimal use of this data revolution in the near future, the willingness to share data between all AgriFood supply chain partners is crucial to keep innovating.
The spectrum of farms is wide, as also the selection of available digital technologies. The asymmetry of size between the players, where multinationals, SME’s, one-man businesses, and family farms collaborate, requires building a climate of trust between the business operators and the farmers. In addition to building trust through consent, there are other challenges to overcome. Access to the digital single market must be guaranteed, data interoperability and portability must be ensured, and the entire chain from farm to fork must be considered. Gaia-X as an open, transparent and interoperable ecosystem presents an appropriate infrastructure for above mentioned challenges. By enabling sovereign data services, Gaia-X will accelerate digitalization efforts and technological advancements in the agricultural sector.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Dr. Stefan Stiene – Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)
Prof. Dr. Engel Hessel – Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMEL)
Energy
The domain working group Energy is working to identify intelligent solutions for power generation, energy storage, power transmission and consumption monitoring. The focus is on all areas of potential generated by a federated data infrastructure throughout the value creation chain and contributed to acceleration and support of the energy transition. The aim is to easily build, assemble and use trusted and value-creating cloud services, as well as create new products/services and foster new business models. For that reason, there is also the possibility of building a strong European digital system layer on top of the existing energy system layer which should be seamlessly coupled.
Data-driven solutions should result in the energy data room coping with the transition to decarbonised energy and carbon neutrality. In addition, enabling energy efficiency and sector coupling (e.g., green energy fluids), as well as more flexibility and renewable energy integration into the European electric system. Thanks to data-sharing possibilities between stakeholders, valuable use cases will be addressed so that new services for European citizens and companies can be deployed.
Addressing these use cases requires cross-border common data knowledge representations, semantic data models, data collection, and sharing data capabilities. Accessing data in trusted and collaborative cloud infrastructures is compulsory to provide comprehensive offerings under high security standards. The Gaia-X strategy through the setting of common policy rules will ensure data, data knowledge representation, and services protection, but also interoperability and portability. These are crucial to reinforce trust and transparency to scale, digitalize and provide new services at a European level.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Prof. Dr. Michael Laskowski – EON
Finance
Up to now many banks, insurance companies, financial institutions have lacked a trusted cloud service & data space between own internal cloud and data platforms and international cloud platforms operating under extra-territorial laws. This has prevented them from accelerating the use of trusted cloud and data-based services and ecosystem-based models, that may provide a competitive advantage to the business. And because of the lack of trusted cloud technical standards, the solution providers (among them fintechs, cloud service providers, software editors) have been hindered in the growing of the cloud business towards the financial industry, slowing down the necessary transformation of users’ operating and business models required to compete more efficiently.
Through Gaia-X, a tangible and close way forward to easily build, assemble and use trusted and value-creating data-based cloud services, as well as create new products/services and foster new business models, that are compliant with European regulations and values, and will fully take advantage of the massive European potential in terms of technical expertise and market size. Gaia-X is seen as a European-wide accelerator of innovation, scaling up open innovation and co-construction by providing secured data sharing and artificial intelligence services at scale, in a compliant and secured way. By combining the forces of the finance-industry with those of governments and academic institutes on the creation of a financial data space within Gaia-X, the domain working group finance is contributing to the Gaia-X network and will foster Europe’s competitiveness and financial markets’ stability, through enhancing research, AI development, disruptive innovation and stability in the legal environment.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Dr. Stephan Bredt – Hessisches Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Energie, Verkehr und Wohnen
Geoinformation
The development of the world economy and its industries - especially those in Europe, depend highly on the availability and accessibility of data. Thereby spatial data, information, and relationships are of great importance, as most of the High Value data Categories (e.g. environment, mobility) are clearly related to space. Spatial relationships of nearly every data type will lead to extensive leverage effects for economies and markets in different perspectives of sustainable development. Thus, it makes sense to develop and maintain a general basis. Ideally this is a network of geo platforms, geo services, and methodologies, to serve different industry demands on a technology open, common, and harmonized geo data and geo information basis.
Gaia-X geoinformation domain working group mission is to unlock the power of spatial relationships through geo spatial enabling technologies by integration in value adding business processes. The characteristics of Gaia-X, known as trust, governance, data sovereignty, data portability, and openness will lead to additional value within geo data dissemination, provision, integration, and usage. From a visionary point of view, a horizontal, and value driven network of interconnected, private, and public geo platforms serve the demands of other vertical Gaia-X domain working groups based on Gaia-X principles. The overall benefit and leverage effect emerge through a geoinformation spread into other Gaia-X domain working groups. This cross-domain approach fosters geo information sharing, creates business value, enforce crowd sourcing, collaboration, innovation, and makes the application of spatial technologies more economical and efficient.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Gerd Buziek, Hon. Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. – Esri Deutschland GmbH
Health
Barely any other area of society has such a directly positive benefit for citizens as the health domain working group. The potential enabled here by digital technology such as networking via cloud infrastructures or artificial intelligence is still a long way from being fully exploited. For the innovative medicine and healthcare of the future, health data needs to be available from different sources and it must be possible to combine and process this whilst also meeting the highest standards of security.
The declared goal of the domain working group Health is to unlock the power of health data and to enable the scale that is essential for research and innovation to thrive within Europe. Moreover, the domain working group Health aims for a collaboration between health sector stakeholders to establish a Health Data Space using the Gaia-X infrastructural framework in order to access and to share health data securely, confidently, governed, and controlled by each stakeholder in a consistent manner. This is also done by analysing a variety of digital health applications that are to be implemented with Gaia-X and by identifying domain-specific requirements. The use cases cover the diverse nature of the health sector, with cases from care, research, and the health industry. For instance, the current issue of coronavirus is also being looked at with use cases.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll – OFFIS e.V. - Institut für Informatik
Prof. Dr. med. Klemens Budde – Charité
Prof. Dr. Roland Eils – Charité
Industry 4.0/SME
Typically, today’s business value in production and manufacturing is generated in a global production value network, built on single, bi- and multilateral business relationships among organizations, regions, markets, and industries. Flexible production value chains are being built dynamically inside the production value network based on bilateral agreements to fulfil specific business objectives. However, this bilateral nature of cooperation hinders multi-stakeholder collaboration down- and upstream the value chain. Instead, a fundamental paradigm shift in the global production ecosystem is needed in order to evolve from bilateral collaboration and to satisfy future business requirements: Multilateral collaboration, digital transparency, integral “sovereign flow of data” allowing end-to-end data exchange in a fully interoperable and sovereign data-oriented ecosystem.
The domain working group Industry 4.0/SME taps into the added benefit from the opportunities that arise from the linking and use of data in production environments. The initiative of the ‘Plattform Industrie 4.0’ formed the basis for developing a federated data infrastructure founded on European values. In this context, Gaia-X allows for a sovereign and transparent hosting and processing of Industry 4.0 data and services. While relying on the Gaia-X infrastructure, the aim of the domain working group Industry 4.0/SME is to create an ecosystem for usable value-added services in heterogeneous production environments and so achieve a breakthrough for the broad implementation of Industry 4.0.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Gerd Hoppe – Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
Mobility
The Mobility domain working group is primarily focused on the IT basis of data infrastructures and their further development. The goal is a transparent and secure data infrastructure for cross-domain industrial collaboration. This should promote innovations in vehicle development and operation, enable new services and improve the overall mobility experience. Use cases, e.g. from production or autonomous driving, will be used to develop concrete solutions that serve as the basis for application-agnostic software modules. Interfaces and usage scenarios from other Gaia-X domain working group are taken into account, because mobility-related data have a high cross-domain relevance. From the domain working group agriculture to energy, health to smart city, new applications can emerge through these data. In turn, the mobility domain working group benefits greatly from geo-information.
The data in the domain working group is largely generated by individual mobility and non-public product information from manufacturers and service providers and then flows back into mobility offerings. This results in a high demand for data security on the one hand and usability on the other. Questions of data sovereignty, authorized use, and partial encryption become the focus. Big data enables AI-powered analytics and tools.
The interoperability of the Gaia-X data infrastructure can contribute significantly to sustainable and secure mobility. A connected and technology-open mobility ecosystem enables collaboration between all players along the entire product lifecycle: from manufacturers, suppliers and raw material providers, to sharing economy initiatives and smart service innovations, to intermodal fleet management. Gaia-X protects personal rights and intellectual property; in line with EU regulations, products, services and processes can be optimized, and safety risks and environmental impacts can be seamlessly captured and reduced in accordance with global and national regulations.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Prof. Frank Köster – Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)
Ulrich Reinfried - Bundesministerium für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur
Public Sector
Digital sovereignty means the state's ability to communicate and act digitally. The public administration of the federal, state and municipalities in Germany has set itself the goal of continuously strengthening the digital sovereignty of the administration in its various roles as user, provider and customer of digital technologies by expanding open interfaces, standards and open source solutions, thereby reducing dependencies.
The digitization of public administration in Germany and the potential of using data need to be accelerated even more overall. Data is the basis of decisions, and its systematic use can help to provide public services faster and better, to enable value creation as well as business models and to make the public infrastructure fit for the future.
The declared goal of Gaia-X's Public domain working group is to drive exchange between public sector players and public and private IT service providers as well as platform operators and to make joint efforts to build a digitally sovereign, resilient, and cross-domain data infrastructure and to improve data use overall. Given Germany's federal structure, this also means informing the administrations at all federal levels about Gaia-X even more than before and convincing them to participate. The Public domain working group aims to formulate the special requirements of the Public Sector for the emerging Gaia-X architecture concept and to work towards ensuring that these are considered.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Tina Siegfried – Dataport
Smart City/Smart Region
Smart cities and smart regions have established themselves internationally as a fixed model for urban and regional development. In the federal government's “Smart City Charter”, for example, data and data infrastructures are mentioned as an important building block in the digital transformation of cities and municipalities. The technical core of all intelligently networked municipalities are data platforms and cloud solutions. The digital transformation secures locational advantages in international competition, increases the quality of life on site and helps to meet the sociological, economic, and ecological challenges of society. This is achieved through the decentralized development of new digital infrastructures and applications by cities, municipalities, and districts. In a commune, for example, data infrastructures in the areas of mobility, health, administration, energy, and education are developed in a decentralized manner.
The Smart City/Smart Region domain working group aims to improve the infrastructure by providing data platforms for cities, municipalities, and districts in order to ensure secure, legally compliant, rule-controlled data exchange and comprehensive data processing as well as the shared use of data from various sources. Gaia-X helps to realize these set goals by offering the Smart city domain working group an improved, easy, and secure access to a multifunctional cloud environment in the GDPR space. Gaia-X will provide required technologies to connect regional and functionally specialized data centres and thus supports the task-specific scaling of smart city applications.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Sascha Tegtmeyer (Speaker) – Landesbetrieb Geoinformation und Vermessung
Ulrich Ahle – FIWARE Foundation
Matthias Brucke – embeteco GmbH & Co. KG
Dr.-Ing. Alanus von Radecki – Daten-Kompetenzzentrum Städte und Regionen (DKSR)
Smart Living
The "Smart Living" ecosystem is developing rapidly. In Europe, residential buildings have a massive potential for Smart Home/Smart Building technologies and related intelligent cross-domain applications/services so that in the future Smart Living technologies and smart services based on it will become a more and more inherent part of our lives. Advanced smart services are considered to be essential for enhanced assistance functionality as well as for more energy efficiency. Because buildings are always part of higher-level structures and networks, a smart home, a smart building, or a group of smart buildings should be able to interact intelligently with smart energy networks, smart city structures, smart mobility offerings and smart assistance services. This development's significant driving factor is artificial intelligence and its potential for highly individualized, context-aware, and cross-domain applications as well as more intelligent systems and devices. An essential prerequisite of AI is the massive digitalization of buildings and related technical installations and as a result sufficient, trustworthy, reliable and – very important – easily accessible and consistent databases.
Consequently, the mission and goal of the domain working group Smart Living is to enable such cross-domain services and applications and to establish concepts, examples and basic implementations for Gaia-X based Smart Living Shared Data Spaces. Furthermore, we aim on dedicated AI-methods for intelligent queries, within federated catalogues, AI based data abstraction, digital twins and an intelligent orchestration of data and services. Given the fact of intensive connections to adjacent domains, the overall goal of the Smart Living domain working group is a Gaia-X empowered “Building as an intelligent Service”.
Contact to the Domain Working Group ambassador:
Anke Hüneburg – ZVEI - Zentralverband Elektrotechnik- und Elektronikindustrie e. V.
Dr. Hilko Hoffmann – Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)
