Data space for smart communities (deployment) Cloud Data and TEF (DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-03)

Outcomes and deliverables

An innovative and federated smart communities’ dataspace, including a large number of EU communities, supported by middleware service solutions.
10 to 12 cross-sector data pilots covering the whole EU by making use of common data sets. These will validate and contribute to the refinement of the blueprint, as well as the refinement of its long-term (economic) sustainability plan.
Objective:
Activities in this topic will pilot and apply the principles of the data space for smart communities defined in the blueprint, on a large scale and with good geographical coverage, to build EU capacity for connecting data from all relevant domains, following their specific legislation. They will also contribute to the fine-tuning and improving the blueprint via a continuous feedback loop to the project. This Data Space will be controlled by public data holders, using open standard based tools and supported by the common middleware platform. It should also create synergies with the project.

Scope:
The action will fund a consortium of relevant supply and demand-side stakeholders to foster innovation among a large number of EU cities and communities, without prejudice to sector legislation. The pilots will comply with the smart communities’ data space blueprint principles and when appropriate use existing standards and follow sectorial legislation. Pilots should cooperate in their impact assessment and generate a common understanding of progress towards the Green transition. In addition, the pilots should ensure compatibility with the principles of the New European Bauhaus and liaise with the project implementing Digital Solutions in support of the New European Bauhaus when relevant.

The action will then support, through cascading grants to third party consortia, pilots, using data available from the data space for smart communities, which should create added value by combining data from at least two of the areas specified below (but can also include other related domains):

predictive traffic management/sustainable mobility planning, exploiting synergies with the data available on the mobility data space and with the data available on transport National Access Points and making use of the Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators;
data-services related to extreme weather events to facilitate climate change adaptation, risk prevention and disaster resilience;
management of energy flows in a city/community specific context and in conjunction with other sectors;
targeting zero pollution (e.g. air, water, soil pollution or waste).
In order to increase the impact and exploit synergies with the Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs), these pilots would be required to minimise investment in infrastructure by executing their activities as much as possible on the available TEFs infrastructure and make any newly created AI service available via trusted application catalogues and marketplace(s). The action should also address rules for ethical AI-enabled solutions at the local level, create AI algorithm registries and define sets of rules that the services should comply with.

The action should also establish links to those Horizon Europe missions that work with communities and cities as key implementing partners (e.g. Mission on Climate Neutral and Smart Cities and Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change), which would provide significant opportunities to test, experiment and up-scale the input to and use of the data space with local partners.

The awarded consortium will work in partnership with the Data Spaces Support Centre in order to ensure alignment with Smart Middleware Platform and the rest of the ecosystem of data spaces:

The data space reference architecture, building blocks and common toolboxes to be used;
The common standards, including semantic standards and interoperability protocols, both domain-specific and crosscutting;
The data governance models, business models and strategies for running data spaces.

Specific Objective 2 of the Digital Europe Programme aims to reinforce the EU’s core Artificial Intelligence (AI) capacities as a crucial driver for the digital transformation of the public and private sectors. The EU data strategy outlined the importance of building a thriving ecosystem of private actors to generate economic and societal value from data, while preserving high privacy, security, safety and ethical standards. It announced that the Commission will invest in a High Impact Project that will fund infrastructures, data-sharing tools, architectures and governance mechanisms for thriving data-sharing and Artificial Intelligence ecosystems.

To reach these objectives, three main interlinked work strands are foreseen in the first two years of implementation of the Digital Europe Programme:

The deployment of cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services compliant with EU rules, notably on security, data protection and privacy and environmental aspects. Open-source by default, they will ensure fluid data flows. Completing the picture, the deployment of the Testing and Experimentation Facility for edge-AI will support the green transition with support to advanced low-power computing technologies. Such facility should be a role model in showing effective ways to comply with existing legislation, and taking into account relevant codes of conduct and guidelines.
The deployment of a Data for EU strand with a focus on building common data spaces, based on the above federated cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services that are accessible to businesses and the public sector across the EU. The objective is the creation of data infrastructure with tailored governance mechanisms that will enable secure and cross-border access to key datasets in the targeted thematic areas. Focus will be on data spaces for Green deal, smart communities, mobility, manufacturing, agriculture, cultural heritage, health, media, skills, language technologies, financial sector, public administrations and tourism. Data spaces will be supported by a Data Space Support Centre in order to guarantee coordination between the various initiatives and guarantee that data could be accessed across different sectors. The centre will ensure the best use of the cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services to serve the needs of these data spaces.
The deployment of AI reference testing and experimentation facilities with a focus on four prioritized application sectors (i.e. health, smart communities, manufacturing, and agriculture) (see also the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence 2021 Review). These facilities will provide common, highly specialised resources to be shared at European level. In addition, the AI-on-demand platform will be consolidated as a catalogue of AI-based resources and marketplace, for trustworthy AI tools made in Europe for both private and public sector use.
The participation is open to all eligible entities as established by Article 18 of the Digital Europe Programme, in particular public sector as well as private sector organisations including SMEs and NGOs.

All topics under this section are subject to the provisions of Article 12(6) of the Digital Europe Programme Regulation. The topics under Specific Objective 2 are closely interconnected within each area of intervention (for example, individual Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs) benefit from common AI tools) as well as between the three intervention areas (for example, Artificial Intelligence is closely linked to the EU data and cloud initiatives, while the data spaces will provide a major source of data for AI-based applications and development as well as links to critical infrastructures, which must operate securely). These links require that the approach towards Article 12(6) must be systematic, i.e. it must take into account not only situations where given action is sensitive from the perspective of the security interest of the Union in itself, but also when it can affect the sensitivity of other actions.

Indicative budget

The budget for the topics included in this chapter is EUR 548 million, distributed as follows:

EUR 204 million for topics supporting the deployment of the cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services, including the Testing and Experimentation Facility for Edge-AI;
EUR 206 million for topics deploying the sectorial data spaces and the related support activities, including the High Value Data Sets;
EUR 139 million for topics implementing the sectorial Testing and Experimentation Facilities and the AI-on-demand platform.