GAIA-X – the Data Space for the digital Industry 4.0 Manufacturing future?
The current wave of digitization is a prime example of how strategically important it will become not to leave these technologies primarily to providers from other economic areas, but to try out our own European approaches, just as China has chosen.
Manufacturing and process automation have shaped digitalization by providing Industry 4.0 concepts. GAIA-X is only continuing this work consistently. In the initial joint German-French project, the requirements for GAIA-X are defined bottom-up, primarily by hundreds of users from the most important domains mentioned in the European Commission's Digital Initiative: a true community project. These user communities of many domains deserve to be offered a digital home as a new alternative, with European standards for data sovereignty, legislative framework, choice of geography for data storage, in hybrid, decentralized and federal structure.
The Federated Services of GAIA-X would be the federal version of an X-Roads system, as known from Estonia, to provide a connecting platform not only for manufacturing, but for all domains of digital life – federal, decentralized, hybrid and diverse, in one word: European.