In recent years, multiple dataspace initiatives were formed and are growing in both implementation and memberships. Dozens of individual dataspaces and use-cases are arising in their context, as listed in the International Data Spaces Association’s “Data Space Radar” and Gaia-X’ initial list, and even more from other initiatives. The European Union pushes this trend even more by including dataspaces as key element in their data strategy and spending 4-6 billion Euros on establishing these in various domains. The main challenges of this trend on dataspaces are twofold. First, no common definition of dataspaces and their core components exist, which complicates interoperability and FAIRness even at conceptual level. This probably produces isolated solutions tailored to specific use-cases only. Second, the various arising dataspaces in the wild follow different goals and have individual implementations and technology readiness levels. The lack of reusable core components forces stakeholders to reinvent these and leads to diverging implementations and therefore high costs.

The workshop intends to bring together people interested in dataspaces and the role of Semantic Computing in these, who may be from different communities such as dataspace drivers, law and policymakers as well as the researchers from the Semantic Computing community. Since members of these different communities rarely have chances to interact, we design the workshop to be highly interactive and communicative. We aim at a full-day workshop with ⅔ formal presentations and ⅓ collaboration using the Open Space technique. This approach enables us to identify promising topics for collaboration and follow-up activities by enabling a dynamic agenda driven by the participants’ shared interests.

We welcome innovative, original, and unpublished contributions with four to six pages in total. Papers must be submitted over the EasyChair conference system using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sds23. Each paper will be peer-reviewed. Papers accepted by the workshop will be published in the conference proceedings published by IEEE Computer Society Press. We require at least one author of each accepted paper to attend the workshop and give an oral presentation. Distinguished quality papers presented at the ICSC conference will be selected for publication in internationally renowned journals (SCI, EI, and/or Scopus indexed).


Topics for submission include but are not limited to:

Conceptual Perspective:
- Surveys on definitions and visions
- What are dataspaces and what are their core elements?
- How are components and data life cycles structured?
- The role of stakeholders in decision processes
- Impact and potential of unique identifiers
- Conceptual reusable assets

State-of-the-art of Implementations:
- How do arising dataspaces coincide/differ with each other?
- Requirements of customers, stakeholders, and politics
- Who drives their implementations and what are their technology readiness levels?
- Common reusable elements
- Gap between academic definitions and actual implementations

Semantic Computing for Dataspaces:
- Review of arising dataspaces with a focus on Semantic Computing
- Potential of methods and solutions from Semantic Computing for dataspaces
- Tailored benefits of ontologies, unique identifiers, algorithms, etc.
- Measuring political, practical, scientific, performance, etc. challenges for adoption