ERCIM News No. 147

The January 2027 issue will contain the following sections:

• Joint ERCIM Actions
• Special Theme: Data Spaces
• Research and Innovation
• Events
• In Brief

The Special Theme and Research and Innovation sections present a panorama of European research activities.

The Special Theme focuses on a topic selected by the editors from a shortlist of areas of particular current interest. The Research and Innovation section contains articles describing scientific activities, research results and technology-transfer initiatives in information and communication science and technology, telecommunications or applied mathematics.

Submissions to the Special Theme are subject to an external review process coordinated by invited guest editors. Submissions to the Research and Innovation section are reviewed and approved by the ERCIM News Editorial Board.

Special Theme: Data Spaces

Preliminary Call

Data spaces are attracting rapidly growing research and technological interest as a means to enable interoperable, secure and trustworthy data sharing across organisations, domains and infrastructures. Current work spans distributed architectures, semantic interoperability, data governance, provenance, privacy, access control, and the integration of data-intensive AI methods.

This special theme will address recent research, technologies, infrastructures and practical experiences related to data spaces. Relevant work may also connect to major European initiatives such as EOSC, Gaia-X and the Common European Data Spaces, as well as to the broader European framework for data sharing.

Possible topics include:

• Architectures and reference models for data spaces
• Federation and interoperability
• Semantic interoperability, metadata, ontologies and knowledge graphs
• FAIR data and FAIR Digital Objects
• Provenance, quality and traceability
• Security, privacy and access control
• Data sovereignty and usage control
• Distributed and decentralised infrastructures
• Data spaces for AI and machine learning
• EOSC, Gaia-X and research data infrastructures
• Sectoral and cross-domain data spaces
• Standards, open-source platforms and connectors
• Pilots, deployed systems and lessons learned

This preliminary Call is subject to revision by the guest editors. The final Call and guest editors’ names will be published here once available.