The emergent European Data Economy relies on the availability of data as a basis for further innovation and exponential development of technologies, especially the development of trustworthy ‘made in Europe’ AI that reflects European values. Data Spaces, platforms and marketplaces are enablers, key to unleash the potential of such data. However, data sharing and data interoperability are still at their infancy. Through DataBri-X, European Data Spaces, platforms and marketplaces and their wide range of business, governmental and public, research and civil society stakeholders will be equipped with a holistic and flexible data governance process and a seamless integrated standards based toolbox for data- and metadata management which can be assembled along relevant requirements, provides open source as well as commercial tools (the bricks / bri-X), and mechanisms to load 3rd party resources like language resources or AI models, and can be easily deployed into Data Spaces and thereby will contribute to make Europe the most successful area in the world in terms of data sharing and data re-use, to gain the full benefit from the value of data, while respecting the legal framework relating to security and privacy. The project's objective is to provide a holistic, energy-efficient and user-friendly toolbox of practical, robust and scalable bricks/Bri-X (processes, technologies and tools) that improve the interoperability, usability, discoverability, quality, and integrity of data and metadata, with the aim of making data sets ready for expanded digital value creation in the context of European Data Spaces. The DataBri-X toolbox will be offered in compliance with accountability, fairness, privacy, and confidentiality regulations as well as FAIR principles and will build on existing and emerging initiatives. The DataBri-X consortium comprises 14 partners from 6 EU members and 1 associated country (UK), that together form a complete value chain of actors.

The rapid growth of web data creates demand for software engineering methods which can build and maintain applications that extract, process and publish web data. However, converting Big Data sources into high-quality, structured knowledge for use in business processes is usually considered data engineering. ALIGNED will develop models, methods and tools for engineering information systems based on co-evolving software and web data. Tools for model-driven software evolution based on Linked Data sources, runtime data quality analytics, human data curation and process integration will aid more efficient governance, increased agility and higher productivity. The opportunities for web data have recently led to intense research and innovation, but most efforts are siloed in the software or data spaces. Past integration of data and software engineering used formal ontologies rather than Linked Data. ALIGNED will provide lightweight methods for European data and software engineering industries to exploit the new opportunities in web data. Information companies like Wolters Kluwer need better ways to extract web data and build applications on top of it. Public bodies like the UK National Health Service (NHS) need evolving systems for data collection and re-use. Web data publishers like DBpedia need new methods to improve data quality. Scientific publications, industry workshops, training programs, open source tools and engaging the OMG, W3C and ISO standards bodies will transfer ALIGNED outputs. ALIGNED combines world class researchers in model driven software engineering (Oxford are transforming NHS systems), Linked Data quality (Leipzig and Trinity College have published foundational papers) and web systems (Leipzig are co-creators of DBpedia) with innovative enterprises (Wolters Kluwer have Linked Data in production systems, Semantic Web Company lead the world in enterprise Linked Data) and pioneering expert-curated data publishers (Oxford Anthropology and Posnan).