Enabling cross-border soil reuse through a soil dataspace
By Stefan de Graaf (Sogelink)
Within the Green Deal Data Space Proof of Concept, the soil circularity use case is testing a custom-developed soil registration platform as its main application. Organizations that manage, supply or need soil can register available soil batches and demand on the platform in order to identify potential matches. Previously, several participants (including one municipality and two provinces in the Netherlands) have already been onboarded and started testing the platform.
However, participants previously lacked the ability to communicate or exchange data with one another. Each participant operated within an isolated instance of the platform, with separate and protected user management. As a result, cross-organizational data exchange was not possible.
Over recent months, a dataspace connector has been deployed for each participant on the Sogelink Cloud infrastructure. For this purpose, TNO’s connector solution, the TNO Security Gateway (TSG), was used. Through the API framework of TSG, the connector was integrated directly into the soil registration platform. This enables participants to independently determine with whom they wish to share their data, without requiring mediation by the platform operator (i.e., Sogelink as the technology provider).
In the coming months, active testing will be conducted with the Province of Fryslân to further investigate the policy and user-role requirements that the data space must support for the soil use case