EU data sovereignty in practice: an explanatory case study of the SAIS agricultural data platform

Agricultural data from the EU’s Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) offer a rich, spatially explicit source for land-use analysis. However, cross-border reuse is limited by heterogeneous national implementations, institutional fragmentation, and governance constraints. This paper examines how EU data sovereignty can be operationalized in geospatial infrastructures to enable analytical reuse of IACS data. We present the Spatial Agricultural Information System (SAIS), a pan-European platform developed at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre to harmonize national IACS datasets while preserving Member State data ownership and control. Using a multi-dimensional evaluation framework encompassing governance, technical architecture, data lifecycle management, and access policies, we assess how SAIS operationalizes sovereignty without impeding analytical usability. Illustrative examples demonstrate how SAIS integrates IACS data with soil and Earth Observation datasets to support cross-border land-use research. The case study shows that governance-aware geospatial platforms can advance EU land-use science while maintaining sovereign control over sensitive agricultural data.