Milan Workshop Summary – June 2025

Key Themes

🌍 Trusted Data Sharing at Scale

Trust emerged as the foundation for everything discussed. Participants emphasized that scalable data sharing across industries and borders requires verifiable identities, enforceable policies, and peer-to-peer exchange models that respect sovereignty.

“Your data, your choice — with great responsibility comes great power.”
— echoed across sessions as a guiding principle

🏗️ Technical Foundation: Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC)

Demos and deep dives showcased how EDC can enable data spaces to operate across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Attendees explored how to deploy, extend, and contribute to EDC as a modular open-source stack.

Focus areas included:

• Multi-tenant EDC architectures
• Federated catalog and control plane evolution
• Deployment patterns across Azure, Fulcrum, and Opiquad-hosted clouds

🤝 Industry and Ecosystem Alignment

Leaders from Catena-X, Manufacturing-X, IDSA, iSHARE, OPCF, and the OPC Foundation shared how they are building production-grade data spaces with real-world constraints:

• Automotive, supply chain, and energy sectors are prioritizing interoperability and self-sovereign identity
• Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) must be first-class citizens, with minimal onboarding friction
• Cross-domain and international cooperation is essential — “no one wants to onboard to five data spaces five different ways”
• OPCF highlighted its role in bridging industrial automation and data spaces, including initiatives such as “OPC UA for Battery Solutions” where European Cloud partners, Fraunhofer, Catena-X, Microsoft, Huawei, and others are prototyping a digital battery passport

🧱 Standards and Regulation

With the EU Data Act taking effect, aligning with emerging standards became a top priority. Topics included:

• The upcoming harmonized European standards for data spaces (per Article 33)
• Profiles and protocols from the Eclipse DSSC working group
• Integration of OPC UA, AAS, and policy enforcement models across layers

Takeaways & Next Steps

Babak Jahromi summarized the spirit of the workshop:

“We’ve come far — now everyone must ask: how do I plug in, and how do I contribute? Some of us will work on multi-tenancy. Others can test binaries in their native environment. The path is emerging.”

Immediate Actions

• ✅ Test and deploy EDC in your own environment (Docker, Azure, Opiquad, etc.)
• ✅ Join a working group (EDC, DSSC, Gaia-X, IDSA, OPCF)
• ✅ Contribute use cases, feedback, and reference integrations
• ✅ Plan for migration paths — data spaces are now running in production

📚 View the full introduction to the European Cloud Accelerator →
🔗 Get started with Eclipse Dataspace Components
🔗 Learn more about OPCF and OPC UA
📄 Download the June 2025 Workshop PDF