Industry Partners

Industry Partners

📅 June 28, 2025 | 🕘 09:24

This session featured insights from key industry leaders and initiatives shaping trusted, interoperable, and sovereign data sharing across sectors.

1. Thomas Obermeyer – Catena-X

Origin & Vision:
Started as a German government-funded research initiative, Catena-X has evolved into a global operational network coordinated by the Catena-X Association.

Scope:
Focused on the automotive industry, involving OEMs (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, VW) and suppliers, with hubs in North America, APAC, China, and Spain.

Key Principles:

• Decentralization: Peer-to-peer data sharing with no central storage
• Trust and Governance: Policies to prevent misuse of sensitive data (e.g., defect or capacity information)
• Interoperability: Avoids lock-in to isolated data spaces

Architecture:
Uses connectors, trust-anchoring services, and promotes open-source tools (e.g., Tractos-X)

Future Focus:

• Scaling to SMEs
• Multi-tenant EDC deployment
• Governance frameworks for critical data flow migration

2. Thomas Hahn – Manufacturing-X

Mission:
Enhance resilience, sustainability, and competitiveness in post-pandemic manufacturing

Integration:
Bridges cross-sector initiatives like Catena-X with domains such as chemicals, semiconductors, and energy

Key Use Case:
Battery Passport – tracking material lifecycle via EDC, OPC UA, and international standards

Global Alignment:
Engages with SESAME (USA), and partners in Canada, Japan, Korea

Joint Services:
Developing shared infrastructure for smart manufacturing, OPC-based standards, and product passporting

3. Stefan Hoppe – OPC Foundation

OPC UA:
Vendor-neutral, open standard for secure, interoperable industrial data exchange from sensor to cloud

Focus Areas:

• Semantic modeling of operational/business data (e.g., robots, machines)
• No IP/licensing barriers, supporting open-source legal safety

Cloud Initiative:
Joint reference architecture launched with AWS, Microsoft, SAP, and Google for data ingestion, modeling, and AI

Complementarity:
OPC addresses semantic/interoperability but not data sovereignty—making it synergistic with data space frameworks

4. Sebastian Steinbuss – IDSA (International Data Spaces Association)

Standards Focus:

• Leading conceptual and technical standards for trusted, interoperable data sharing
• Driving ISO/IEC 20151, which defines data spaces

Key Features:

• Policy Enforcement across law, contracts, and usage lifecycle
• Decentralized Trust: No central intermediaries
• Eclipse EDC as open-source reference implementation

Compliance Alignment:
Closely tied to the EU Data Act (Article 33) with active standardization engagement

5. Rajiv Rajani – iSHARE Trust Framework

Goal:
Organizational data sovereignty — “Your data, your choice.”

Framework Capabilities:

• Validates identity, authentication, authorization, and usage policies
• Supports decentralized authorization via registries

Use Case:
Dutch sustainability data space