The five Horizon Europe sister projects funded under the HORIZON-CL4-2023-DATA-01-02 topic – DS2, NOUS, CyclOps, CEDAR and PLIADES – organised a joint session at the European Big Data Value Forum 2026 (EBDVF 2026), held in Galway, Ireland, on 30 September – 1 October 2026. 

The session, “From Vision to Reality: Lessons Learned in Data Sharing, Interoperability and AI Across Sectors” , built on the projects’ 2024 and 2025 EBDVF joint sessions, including the Pecha Kucha workshop at the AI, Data, Robotics Forum 2025 in Stavanger, and shifted the focus from theoretical challenges to proven, real-world impact. Through rapid-fire pitches and concrete case studies, the projects showcased successful cross-sector data sharing in cities, agriculture, environment, mobility, energy, public administration and science. An interactive panel on commercial sustainability examined how these results can be scaled beyond the initial funding lifecycle, and the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC) presented the synergies and opportunities ahead for the data spaces community.

The session highlighted that technical connectivity alone does not create trusted interoperability: data becomes usable across data spaces only when identities, policies and usage conditions travel with it and remain enforceable, and when specifications are validated end to end rather than module by module. Governance has become the main bottleneck, making machine-actionable policies and support services essential, especially for SMEs; public administrations need legal certainty and trusted intermediaries to open their data; data-quality and semantic work has a measurable effect on AI performance; and open, testable building blocks connecting data spaces to edge, cloud, HPC and AI turn shared data into coordinated action. 

The aim of this joint publication is to capture the main lessons emerging from the implementation experiences presented and discussed during the EBDVF 2026 workshop, identify challenges that remain beyond individual projects, and highlight priorities for the European Data Spaces ecosystem, future R&I, standardisation and policy initiatives.

Download the Report on Zenodo