ECA-SDN - Federated data space for the Agri-food Cooperative Ecosystem

ECA-SDN (European Cooperative Agro Socioeconomic Dataspace Network) is a technical initiative aimed at exploring a federated and governed data-sharing model for the agri-food cooperative ecosystem. The project addresses the challenge of enabling independent organisations to share and reuse data while preserving control over what is shared, with whom, for what purpose, and under which conditions. This technical paper describes the objectives, architecture, governance model, interoperability mechanisms and validation results of the ECA-SDN prototype. The solution combines the OSCAR platform, which provides the business-oriented user experience for cooperatives and sectoral organisations, with a data space layer based on Eclipse EDC, supporting participant provisioning, identity, catalogues, usage policies, contract negotiation and traceable data transfers. The architecture incorporates technologies and concepts including the Dataspace Protocol, JSON-LD, ODRL, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials, IdentityHub and Federated Catalog, with the aim of supporting standards-based interoperability and data sovereignty. The prototype was validated in a controlled local environment through 300 automated tests and five end-to-end integration checks, covering asset discovery, contract negotiation, transfer initiation and data retrieval through OSCAR. These results demonstrate functional interoperability for the validated scenario, while not constituting a certification, security audit, load test or production deployment. The paper also discusses potential applications in socioeconomic indicators, sectoral observatories and territorial-to-national data collaboration, as well as future requirements related to governance, semantic interoperability, data quality, security, resilience and ecosystem adoption.