Hannover Fair: Where leadership meets innovation

Hannover Fair is one of the world's largest trade shows for industrial technology. It is held annually in Hannover, Germany, and attracts exhibitors and visitors from around the world. The fair is important because it provides a platform for companies to showcase their latest technologies and products in the fields of automation, robotics, energy, industrial software, and other related industries. Within each area, exhibitors showcase their latest products and services, including new machinery, equipment, software, and other innovative solutions for industrial processes. The fair also provides a premier forum for networking and exchanging ideas with other industry professionals as it is attracting business leaders as well as key decision makers from politics like the German Chancellor and Federal German Ministers, such as Dr. Habeck visiting Catena-X (with blue tie in the center of Figure 1).

Figure 1: German Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Dr. Habeck, with Catena-X association board members (courtesy of Catena-X)

Dataspace liftoff with the launch of Catena-X

Hannover Fair is known as a major platform for showcasing innovative technologies and key initiatives. Some of the highlights of the fair over the years have included the introduction of Industry 4.0 in 2011. This concept revolutionized the manufacturing industry by integrating advanced automation, data analytics, and other cutting-edge technologies to create smart factories. HMI 2023 continues this tradition with the commercial launch of dataspaces:

• A dataspace is unique for its data sharing with data sovereignty protection – the power to control rights to your data (Lauf et al. 2022). This is accomplished using trust mechanisms, such as self-description requirements (who is requesting your data, see Gaia-X 2022), access controls (who can see your data offer), usage policies (how can your data be used - duration, purpose, etc.), as well as legal and technical enforcement (Otto et al. 2019).
• German chancellor Olaf Scholz is doubling down on dataspaces as the "top megatrend" (Scholz 2022) following his predecessor's quest to "build a first automotive dataspace" (Angela Merkel during Autogipfel or auto summit in October 2020, Delhaes 2020).
• See Figure 1 for Catena-X launching "the first open and collaborative data ecosystem" with the Cofinity-X operating company based on dataspace technology developed by a consortium of 28 partners funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action's (BMWK) as part of the funding program "Future Investments in the Automotive Industry" (kopa35c.de). Figure 1 depicts
  Minister Habeck (BMWK), with associates from Volkswagen, Siemens, SAP, BDI, ZF, Fraunhofer, Bosch, Mercedes Benz and BMW.

Figure 2: Telekom Data Intelligence Hub team with the premiere of dataspace products and first users

Our products at Catena-X, Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility, IDSA and Google

Our Telekom Data Intelligence Hub (DIH) team celebrated the launch of our first dataspace products that allow even small and medium-sized companies without IT departments to get connected quickly and focus on data provisioning and participation in use cases. Figure 2 shows:

• Our DIH tribe and chapter lead Sven Loeffler pointed out how Umati is using our Living Lab product, a sandbox software development environment, to allow focusing on use cases and prototyping of apps powered by dataspace capabilities, such as data sovereignty protection, without all the dataspace complexities.
• Our senior data scientists Dr. Dandan Wang and Sven discussing our ID clearing house service offering with Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL.
• Maximilian Staebler, Prof. Dr. Frank Koester (both German Aerospace Center or DLR), Dr. Dandan Wang, and Prof. Dr. Chris Schlueter Langdon (both Telekom DIH) at both of the Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility family of five projects: Frank is leading the entire family (Frank is founding Director of the DLR Institute for AI Safety and Security); Chris is head of one family member, Gaia-X 4 Advanced Mobility Services (GX4AMS), and leads together with Dandan the dataspace part of the family member Gaia-X 4 Artificial Intelligence (GX4AI). Just in time for HM, our DIH team installed a minimum viable Gaia-X dataspace for GX4AI and the family.
• At the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) roundtable, we proudly announced the successful completion of a certification milestone for a next-generation connector in our Connect product offerings: Ulrich Ahle (CEO Fiware Foundation), Prof. Dr. Chris Schlueter Langdon (Telekom DIH, Director Peter Drucker Customer Lab, Peter Drucker School), Prof. Dr. Boris Otto (Head of Fraunhofer ISST, TU Dortmund), Dr. Dandan Wang (Telekom DIH), Lars Nagel (CEO IDSA), Niels Syassen (IDSA board member, CTO Sick).
• Launch of Catena-X data ecosystem with Alexander Schleicher (CEO Cofinity-X) and Oliver Ganser (Program Head - Data Driven Value Chain @ BMW Group, Head of "Catena-X Automotive Network" – Industry Consortia, Chairman of the Board - Catena-X e.V.) on the HMI stage of Industrie 4.0 (link). This would not have been possible without our team's open-source software development contributions to the Eclipse Tractus-X repository that provides the underpinnings of the Catena-X data ecosystem. Cofinity-X is the first dataspace operating company sanctioned by Catena-X.
• Our DIH team has been part of the T-Systems stand on the Google booth to premier our Connect product with a Sovereign Plus option running in the Sovereign cloud, a joint venture of T-Systems and Google. With Sovereign Plus, data sovereignty protection doesn't stop with the data exchange in a dataspace but extends to cloud storage.

Learn more from our pioneering dataspace projects

• What is it: For a C-level 1-pager, link, and a Dataspace Top 10 overview, link
• How to get started: Check out our Digital.ID and dataspace connectivity solutions, link
• First use cases such as Umati, link, and intermodal mobility, link

References

Delhaes, D. 2020. Merkel drängt Autokonzerne: BMW, Daimler und VW sollen Datenschatz teilen. Handelsblatt (2020-10-28), link

Gaia-X. 2022. Gaia-X Trust Framework - 22.04 Release. Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL, Bruxelles, Belgium, link

Otto, B., S. Steinbuss, A. Teuscher, and S. Lohmann. 2019. Reference Architecture Model Version 3.0 (April). International Data Spaces Association, Berlin, link

Lauf, F., S. Scheider, J. Bartsch, P. Herrmann, M. Radic, M. Rebbert, A. T. Nemat, C. Schlueter Langdon, R. Konrad, A. Sunyaev, and S. Meister. 2022. Linking Data Sovereignty and Data Economy: Arising Areas of Tension. Best Paper Award at the 17th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI22), link

Scholz, O. 2022. Rede von Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz zur Festveranstaltung der Deutschen Akademie der Technikwissenschaften am 18. Oktober 2022 in Berlin. Bulletin der Bundesregierung Nr. 134-1 (21. Oktober), link