This DSGA will need to ensure adoption on its building blocks through participants deploying data space use cases. While many different use cases can be deployed across a variety of domains, to ensure initial traction and adoption DS4Skills proposes to focus on one domain.
Throughout the interviews conducted and the assessment of use cases, it appears that the need for upskilling citizens towards AI skills is a high value use case of concern to most if not all stakeholders across the EU. Indeed, while some industries are dying and jobs are being lost through automation, AI also creates the demand for new skills to operate AI tools in all domains. Use cases on how to upskill / reskill people towards these opportunities will be understandable by all and will gather interest of all stakeholders. Moreover, there can be use cases deployed on all 3 main usage scenarios (map, match, forecast) towards this goal.
To support this, call for projects could be made to come develop such use cases at EU level on top of the DSGA’s building blocks and trusted infrastructure providers (developed and integrated through the EDGE-Skills project). These projects could be partially funded, to kick start the data space, thanks to public funding coming from the Digital Europe Programme. They would get support to set up their use case and be able to use the data space infrastructure to implement them. They would as well be in touch with other relevant selected use cases to grow and mutualise efforts. All the costs would be partially funded for this first set of use cases to launch the data space at high level.
Such a strategy is essential to an effective growth and roll out of the skills data space. Indeed, focusing first on one identified domain reduces the complexity in the message and guarantees high demand. Moreover, this ensure mutualisation at EU level and creates next generation skills and education products that are largely deployed across the continent, to create true EU digital champions.
This will allow to create the sufficient network effect and critical mass adoption to then have a sustainable data space and mitigate the risk of not having enough data set or services connected or too scattered projects. Lastly, this will ensure that all relevant stakeholders, data and service providers are onboarded onto a same infrastructure; their data sets and services can then be reused by any use case.
In a nutshell, focusing on first targeted and co funded use cases will allow a strong marketing and political push to adopt the infrastructure and these integrations can then be used to power all sorts of use cases.