Abacus EDC — Cultural data space with sovereign exchange

The Spanish cultural sector runs on consumption data that no operator wants to centralise: ticketing platforms, bookshops, festivals and venues each hold detailed records of who buys what and where, and every one of them treats that telemetry as commercially sensitive — and often personally sensitive, since cultural consumption maps onto language, ideology and identity. ABACUS SCCL’s Espacio Cultural de Datos set out to prove that a cooperative of cultural organisations can pool insight without pooling raw data, under contracts that the infrastructure itself enforces.

Acuratio designed and implemented the architecture and governance of the data space, adapting its SaaS platform to the cultural sector’s data model and to Abacus’ federated topology. Every exchange is mediated by a versioned data contract expressed in ODRL — purpose of use, expiry, redistribution limits, traceability obligations — and applied automatically by an Eclipse Dataspace Connector node deployed on each participant’s side. Two complementary modalities coexist on the same fabric: pure data exchange of anonymised or aggregated cultural-consumption datasets through supervised APIs, and federated information exchange where the algorithms travel to the data rather than the other way round, so that raw transactional records never leave the provider’s environment. The shared dataset spans the 2024–2025 period and covers anonymised ID, gender, age, event name, event type, location, date, and spend across the whole of Spain; aggregation happens after a dataset lands in the space, never before, and partners only see results at the agreed granularity — never each other’s transactional rows.

Identity and trust are decentralised. Each participant operates under its own Decentralised Identifier issued by a Gaia-X-aligned identity provider, presents Verifiable Credentials through the Gaia-X Credential Manager, and authenticates over OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect with signed JWTs that the EDC validates before granting access. Authorisation combines RBAC roles (node administrator, data owner, authorised analyst, collaborating entity, auditor) with attribute-based ODRL policies, so the same dataset can be exposed to different audiences under different contracts without code changes. Every step of a 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 and alignment with the European data-space frameworks.

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 model — which means 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 Espacio Cultural de Datos de Abacus is funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation under programme TSI-100123-2024-050.