A data space for Spain's cultural sector without anyone giving up the data

Cultural consumption data is, quite literally, what you read, what you watch, and what you go to. Aggregated across millions of people, it is the most useful telemetry a cultural-policy maker or a creative industry could ask for. Asked of any individual operator to hand over, the answer is no — and rightly so. The records are commercially sensitive (cultural consumption is competitive market intelligence) and personally sensitive (it maps onto language, ideology and identity in a way that regulators take seriously). The textbook obstacle to a national view of cultural demand has always been that no operator is willing to be the one centralising the data.

ABACUS SCCL’s Espacio Cultural de Datos is the cooperative answer: a federated data space for Spanish cultural organisations — ticketing platforms, bookshops, festivals, venues — where insight can be pooled without raw records ever leaving the operator. Acuratio designed and built the architecture and governance, adapting its SaaS platform to the cultural sector’s data model and to Abacus’ federated topology.

The fabric runs on Eclipse Dataspace Connector nodes deployed at each participant, with every exchange mediated by a versioned ODRL data contract — purpose of use, expiry, redistribution limits, traceability obligations — that the connector applies automatically. Two complementary modalities sit on the same infrastructure: a supervised-API data exchange of anonymised or aggregated cultural-consumption datasets, and a federated information exchange where the algorithms travel to the data rather than the other way round. Aggregation happens after a dataset lands in the space, never before; partners only ever see results at the agreed granularity, never each other’s transactional rows.

Identity and trust are decentralised end-to-end. Each participant operates under its own DID issued by a Gaia-X-aligned identity provider, presents Verifiable Credentials through the Gaia-X Credential Manager, and authenticates over OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect with signed JWTs that the EDC validates before granting access. RBAC roles (node administrator, data owner, authorised analyst, collaborating entity, auditor) combine with attribute-based ODRL policies, so the same dataset can be exposed to different audiences under different contracts without code changes. Every step of every contract — negotiation, formalisation, execution — is logged immutably in a traceability repository validated against the Gaia-X Digital Clearing House, which is also what auditors and the cooperative’s own governance bodies query when verifying GDPR compliance.

The result is an infrastructure technically aligned with IDS-RAM v4.0 and Gaia-X, semantically aligned with the European cultural-data vocabularies, and operationally aligned with ABACUS SCCL’s cooperative governance — meaning new providers and consumers can join without renegotiating the whole network, and analysts can run cross-organisation studies of cultural consumption at national scale without any single partner losing control of their data. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation under programme TSI-100123-2024-050.

The ABACUS EDC case study has the full architectural detail.