Sharing and reusing data across organisations is central to the European data strategy and its transformation towards creating a data-driven economy. Currently, data sharing, when it occurs, is typically facilitated through centralised platforms or bilateral integration solutions, which are increasingly failing to meet requirements for flexibility, trustworthiness, and self-determination over shared data. Data spaces have emerged as a promising solution, built on distributed and shared infrastructure and governance frameworks. However, widespread adoption requires consensus on the necessary organisational and technical capabilities. This paper proposes a data service model and design principles for data services to clarify choices and guide decision-making. We adopt a novel perspective by conceptualising data spaces as meta-organisations to guide an Action Design Research study, utilising privileged access to key large-scale European data space projects in the mobility and automotive sectors. This paper not only develops a nascent design theory for data spaces, but also offers a practical framework, breaking down complex challenges into actionable, scientifically validated components – for further growth and adoption of data spaces.

Sharing data is highly potent in assisting companies in internal optimization and designing new products and services. While the benefits seem obvious, sharing data is accompanied by a spectrum of concerns ranging from fears of sharing something of value, unawareness of what will happen to the data, or simply a lack of understanding of the short- and mid-term benefits. The article analyzes data sharing in inter-organizational relationships by examining 13 cases in a qualitative interview study and through public data analysis. Given the importance of inter-organizational data sharing as indicated by large research initiatives such as Gaia-X and Catena-X, we explore issues arising in this process and formulate research challenges. We use the theoretical lens of Actor-Network Theory to analyze our data and entangle its constructs with concepts in data sharing.

Data is the main driver of the digital economy. Accordingly, companies are interested in maintaining technical control over the usage of their data at any given time. The International Data Spaces initiative addresses exactly this aspect of data sovereignty with usage control enforcement. In this paper, we introduce the so-called Workflow with Data and Usage control network (WFDU-net) model. The data consumer can visually define his or her workflow using the WFDU-net model and annotate the data operations and context. With model checking we validate that the WFDU-net follows the usage policies defined by the data owner. Afterwards, the compliant WFDU-net can be executed by exporting the WFDU-net in a Petri Net Markup Language (PNML). We evaluated our approach by using our example WFDU-net in a data analytics use case.