From fragmentation to scalable value from data

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Data sharing

How can we prevent the growing landscape of data spaces and data-sharing initiatives from becoming a source of fragmentation itself?

The CoE-DSC Landscape Scan 2026 identified 124 data-sharing initiatives and 99 service providers in the Netherlands earlier this year. This overview is not exhaustive and demonstrates how rapidly the landscape is evolving. As the number of initiatives, standards and service providers continues to grow, collaboration across organisational, sectoral and ecosystem boundaries becomes increasingly important.

The challenge is not to make everything the same, but to make conscious decisions about what can be reused, where harmonisation is needed, and where there should remain room for domain-specific choices.

New publications and tools

CoE-DSC shares new publications and practical tools covering four closely related themes: interoperability, harmonisation, reuse and trust. We highlight two of them:

  • Interoperability, Harmonisation and Generic Building Blocks for Data-Sharing Initiatives: a practical guide for participants, policymakers, contracting authorities, programmes and service providers. It translates this cross-sector challenge into concrete principles, considerations and courses of action.
  • From Fragmentation to Alignment: a Data Sharing Strategy Model that helps assess requirements, agreements, solutions and market services in relation to one another. The model supports decisions on what can be organised collectively, what is still evolving, what should remain domain-specific, and where genuine innovation is required.

Value

These publications do not prescribe a single architecture, governance model or technology. Instead, they support organisations in making explicit choices that enable initiatives to retain their own value while collaborating more effectively with others.

Creating value from data is the ultimate objective. Interoperability, harmonisation, reuse and trust are what make that value scalable.

For more information and a complete overview of the publications, visit: Scaling Value from Data Sharing

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