Activating data and services in data spaces: A mobility case study

The mobility sector plays a critical role in modern societies, encompassing diverse types of movement for both tourism and work-related purposes. Moreover, this sector is linked with the current ability to widely generate real-time data, providing valuable information that can be leveraged for analytics and informed decision-making. However, extracting actionable insights remains challenging due to the pronounced heterogeneity of data sources and the often unreliable nature of traditional data exchange environments. Data spaces have emerged as a solution to these challenges, providing secure and governed environments for inter-organizational data sharing while ensuring that data owners retain full sovereignty over what they provide. Specifically, data spaces enable secure collaborations between consumers, who need to exploit their data, and providers, who offer value-added services to support decision-making processes. Nonetheless, despite their potential, research on data spaces is still in its early stages, and there is no clear consensus on the core concepts that underpin their practical implementation. Therefore, we first conduct a comprehensive literature review to design an architecture for data spaces and then we present the implementation of this architecture in a mobility data space. Our case study demonstrates the practical applicability of data spaces in the mobility domain, illustrating how they can be used not only to activate datasets but also to enable value-added services built upon those data, such as interactive dashboards. The results show that data spaces offer a viable approach for effectively leveraging mobility data, supporting both operational optimization and strategic decision-making in transportation services.