Australian Dataspaces: From Exemplars to an Enduring National Capability

Enabling data owners to retain control of their data while providing trusted, governed access for others to accelerate research, innovation and evidence-based decision making across the country.

Background

The Ambitious Australia report flagged an urgent need for improved national R&D coordination and coherence across academia, industry and government. Australian researchers across industry and government generate vast amounts of high-quality data. However, technical barriers for secure sharing and the cost of bespoke agreements in risk-focused governance structures combine to result in this hard-won data often being completely siloed. Enabling data owners to retain control of their data while providing trusted, governed access for others would accelerate research, innovation and evidence-based decision making across the country.

Phase 1 of the Australian Dataspaces Program  led by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) demonstrated the value and feasibility of dataspaces in the Australian context via partnering with the International Dataspaces Association (IDSA), establishing practical pilot projects, and developing an initial testbed.

CeRDI Partnership with ARDC

CeRDI is partnering with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) on the next phase of the Australian Dataspaces Program: From Exemplars to an Enduring National Capability. 

Building on the lessons from the earlier work, Phase 2 will establish a national dataspace ecosystem focused on exemplar-led development, enabled by governance, service, and infrastructure. Co-investment exemplars demonstrating the value of dataspaces in solving complex multi-organisational data sharing challenges across research, industry, and government are critical to this initiative's success, and CeRDI is leading this work alongside ARDC colleagues. The focus for the two exemplars will be to address significant earth, environmental and agricultural challenges. The first exemplar to progress to co-design will focus on agriculture.

Agricultural Exemplar Dataspace

Australian agriculture generates vast and growing volumes of production, quality, sustainability and environmental data. Much of it stays fragmented and underused, held across many organisations, platforms and systems. Sharing it has usually meant giving up control, so commercially sensitive data rarely reaches the people who could turn it into better decisions, and value is lost. The barrier is rarely the technology. It is trust, control, and the cost of connecting many parties one agreement at a time.

Outcomes

An Australian agricultural exemplar dataspace aims to provide trusted infrastructure which lays the groundwork that lets producers, service providers, supply-chain participants, researchers, government and the finance sector provide, access and reuse agricultural data under conditions each data owner sets. By lowering the cost and raising the value of data sharing, it aims to improve productivity, sustainability, traceability and market access, and to support new research and financial products. It will also establish the governance and technical foundations for a self-sustaining agricultural data ecosystem, producing reusable patterns that others across Australian agriculture can adopt.

Innovation

The project is applying the dataspace model to Australian agriculture. Unlike conventional centralised platforms, a dataspace keeps data with its owner and only lets it be accessed and used under agreed, machine-enforced rules. The governance, trust and shared rules of the dataspace are as important as its technical architecture. Owners decide who can use their data and for what, analysis can run on the data inside a secure environment so only results are shared and not the underlying data, and producers can be benchmarked against peers without any party seeing another's data. The dataspace will align with international standards and shared data models, and aims to connect with existing initiatives, including AgReFed , the Australian Agricultural Data Exchange  (AADX), AgTrace  and the Australian Farm Data Code .

Approach

The dataspace will be developed through co-design with the partners who will use it. Rather than a single-purpose solution, the Agricultural Exemplar Dataspace is envisaged as enabling infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of applications across Australian agriculture, similar in scope to the Common European Agricultural Data Space (CEADS ) which is creating a secure, interoperable environment for exchanging agricultural data across Europe.

Illustrative use cases include:

• Yield and nutrient management decision-support, combining securely shared yield data with soil and environmental data to generate yield maps, nitrogen management recommendations and context-specific peer benchmarks.
• Grain quality assurance, blending and traceability support, enabling secure sharing of grain quality information, collaborative optimisation of blending opportunities and integration with traceability systems and digital product passports.
• Sustainability reporting and benchmarking, allowing producers to reuse data across multiple reporting and certification requirements while providing meaningful peer-based performance comparisons.
• Insurance and finance innovation, combining production and climate data to support climate-risk modelling, calibration of index-based insurance products and development of outcome-linked lending and investment products.

Future Directions

• Join the Australian Dataspaces Hub Webinar launch (26 October 2026 4-5pm AEDT)
  The Australian Dataspaces Hub is being established to support trusted, sovereign and interoperable data sharing across research, government and industry in Australia. The Hub will connect the Australian ecosystem with global dataspace initiatives and support the development of sector-specific data spaces aligned with international standards
• Register interest in the Agricultural Exemplar Dataspace Co-design 

Resources

• Australian Dataspaces Program 
• Australian Dataspaces FAQs