European data spaces for urban digital twins: user-and implementation-driven recommendations

Data spaces are driving smart city innovation by promoting interoperability, standardization, and predictive analytics, enabling proactive urban management and fostering innovation by creating a collaborative data ecosystem. The European Community is strongly promoting data spaces design initiatives. However, designers face complex challenges in complying with legal data regulations due to the lack of mature, unified solutions.This study aims to fill a gap in data space design literature by gathering key factors and scouting compliant implementations. It introduces European initiatives and their joint ventures, and identifies overlaps and lack of coordination between their proposals. Using these results, we formulate suggested actions and organize them into seven areas. For each given area, the most suitable European data space initiatives in terms of technical specifications and implementations are finally proposed to DS developers. The recommendations are intended to assist DS developers in identifying and navigating European DS design initiatives before selecting the most suitable proposal.