Creating the new culture of Holocaust remembrance by setting up the European Memory Data Space
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Dit artikel is geplaatst op: CoE-DSC
On June 6, Jewish Heritage Network leading the EU-funded project European Memory Data Space (EMDS) organised an event about data spaces at the Dutch National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Pavel Kats (co-founder of Jewish Heritage Network, JHN) and Yekaterina Travkina (consultant at INNOPAY and researcher at the CoE-DSC) share their key take-aways.
The importance of technology and innovation to remember
Pavel says: “Jewish Heritage Network is an NGO dedicated to the promotion of Jewish heritage and culture, using today’s technologies and innovation. We are interested in how innovation can create new ways of engaging with cultural heritage.” Innovation is also important for how Europeans will remember the Holocaust, the foundational event of Europe’s modern history, especially as its last direct witnesses will pass away in the coming years. Pavel says: “It will change from an event which is still in people’s memory, to an event about which you can only read in books. The question is: how do we remember it in the 21st century?”
To answer this question, JHN started a project called the European Memory Data Space (funded by the CERV program of the European Commission). The EMDS will become an innovative data space ecosystem dedicated to Holocaust-related data. It will join the family of Common European Data Spaces and bring together archives, research institutions, commemoration projects, and memorials across Europe. The EMDS aims to connect thousands of data sources to create the foundations of the remembrance culture of the 21st century.
Creating a blueprint
The goal of the EMDS project is to design and ultimately implement a Blueprint for the future data space for Holocaust-related materials. Pavel says: “Working with various stakeholder communities, we will collaboratively design the Blueprint of the data space, visualise it, and communicate it to a broad audience of professionals and activists involved with Holocaust-related data.” To create this Blueprint, JHN will organise a series of collaborative workshops across Europe in 2025-2026. During the kick-off event of June 6, leading experts in European data spaces took the first step by sharing their visions and helping JHN and its project partners understand the evolving landscape of data spaces.
Pavel has been involved with data sharing initiatives for cultural heritage for many years, so data sharing isn’t new to him and he is aware of the challenges. But he hadn’t been involved in data space projects yet. He says: “It’s a great vision: to have a set of conventions, standards, understandings, and governing principles that allow different data holders or other stakeholders to share data in a responsible way while the owners preserve sovereignty over it. It enables people to understand where and how the data is used and by whom. The cultural heritage community has been familiarising itself with concepts like data sovereignty and trust frameworks, but we didn’t have a clear sense of what we should do to build a data space. The community needs to answer fundamental questions like: what are data space architectures, what are the frameworks on offer, who decides what a data space is? And of course, it’s important to know what type of regulations there are, because Holocaust data is subject to numerous laws, regulations, and rules related to privacy. The kick-off event created an open stage for people to share what is happening in this field so we can broaden our knowledge and get started. We were very pleased with the valuable contributions of the CoE-DSC and will stay in close contact to make the project a success.”
Collaboration is key
During the event, Yekaterina facilitated the discussion about Data Spaces Landscape developments and led a roundtable session on practical steps forward to realising value and roll out. She says: “The goal of the CoE-DSC is to help parties get more knowledge about data spaces, for example how to build one, how to start use cases, and start generating value in practice. At the event, we wanted to inspire people, talk with parties involved, and provide support for use cases if needed. Other European data space bodies were also present to connect and share ideas, like the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), Gaia-X, and the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC).”
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These parties offer various tools and sources to get started with building a data space. IDSA provides a reference framework and a data space protocol. Gaia-X offers functional specifications for trust and compliance in federative digital ecosystems and the DSSC provides the Blueprint and the Toolbox around various building blocks that data spaces can draw inspiration from. Furthermore, the Data Space Business Alliance (DSBA) has been created as a partnership between IDSA, Gaia-X, BDVA, and Fiware, to steer interoperability between the initiatives and their provided data spaces tools. In the same light of supporting interoperability, the European Commission started building Simpl, which is a middleware tooling for data spaces.
But Yekaterina highlights an important challenge. “When creating a data space, you need to review and choose specific tooling, which is a very difficult journey. With the plethora of all kinds of tools and ways you can operationalise your data space, the question remains: where do I start? In general, it is important to gather with your community, discuss your use cases, and requirements they pose for making the right design choices. Based on that, think about what your trust framework would look like, what implementations you would need to ensure trust and actual value creation, and go from there. It’s a very open process, which also makes it challenging.”
Pavel agrees: “We need partnerships and to actively engage with others. This project will succeed or fail based on the engagement of the community. And it’s important to work on alignment between initiatives. In order to do so, we have to start conversations early, for example with the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). They want to build an interconnected data infrastructure for European holocaust research. We, from the EMDS project, should talk to them to see what we can offer in our blueprint that they don’t. ”
Lessons learned
Yekaterina says when starting a data space initiative, it’s important to connect with the ecosystem to leverage the voices of a lot of partners and to see what is already out there. It’s also crucial to collect requirements and leverage use cases to make your implementation useful to the people who are going to use this in practice. Yekaterina says you have to consider for example the requirements reflected in the DSSC building blocks (Business, Governance, Legal, and Technical). She adds: “If you consider this, you’ll see more clearly what the needs are in use cases, in the ecosystem, and in the data space. But it’s not just about how you enable this on a technical level, the business and legal perspectives also matter. For a lot of parties in the Holocaust memory space, ‘business case’ is a concept that doesn’t resonate very often. But at the end of the day there is a need to find value cases that help secure funding in order to support what they are doing.”
Pavel also thinks that requirements are important to look at, preferably informed by actual use cases. “We will have conversations with educators, city projects, and researchers, who can tell us what they are doing with data and what they want to do. We need to help them to think about what they could do with data that they didn’t suspect/think about in the past. We need to map this to reality and create use cases. And then, derive requirements from this.” Furthermore, Pavel believes that data spaces need to be explained and communicated clearer and better. “It’s hard to get an overview of what’s there. Very few people can give an overview into the subject of data spaces. Few people can say what IDSA or Gaia-X are doing. That’s a problem. We need to educate the field way better, for example by visualising important elements to portray what is the core of what these initiatives offer, how it is all related/interoperable etc. And the CoE-DSC is also very helpful in providing more clarity and an overview.”
JHN is planning its next events. On 8 October, JHN, together with Europeana and the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed, NDE), will organise the event ‘From Data to Blueprint’. Building on the kick-off event held in June, this next event will start with the fundamentals: the data itself. This is specifically intended for professionals who work with data every day, including metadata managers, collection specialists, digitisation experts, project managers, data and system architects.
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