Cross-Data Space Interoperability: Key Challenges

Seamless data exchange across various domains and geographies is crucial for innovations and economic growth. To unlock the latent potential of data spaces, ensuring interoperability across data spaces has been raised as a fundamental question within the data space community. Nevertheless, cross-data space interoperability, i.e., the ability of participants to seamlessly access and/or exchange data across two or more data spaces, is a complex and challenging issue to tackle. To better understand the current status and key challenges of cross-data space interoperability, the Data Spaces Support Centre conducted exploratory discussions from April to August 2025 in collaboration with multiple members of the data space community. The general scope of these discussions was to accelerate the interoperability between data spaces and identify and communicate the most crucial unresolved issues. This blogpost presents the findings of these discussions and provides a brief overview of the key challenges currently hindering the interoperability of data spaces.