What is the focus of DS4Skills? It is co-funded by the European Commission and focuses on fostering innovation, improving education, and supporting employment strategies. It provides a human-centric, distributed, and sovereign data space infrastructure deployed for the education, skills, and tourism domains.
DS4Skills (Data Space for Skills) and EDGE-Skills are two parallel and complementary European projects co-funded by the European Commission, focused on the development of a data ecosystem for education, skills and labor market. Overall, they support the creation and deployment of the European Skills Dataspace, tackling both the strategic and technical aspects of the ecosystem.
Its objective is to improve the manner skills-related data is shared and reused among key ecosystem stakeholders such as educational and training providers, employers, public authorities, service providers and individuals. With the application of the dataspace principles, the project seeks to overcome the existing information silos and allow trusted collaboration among all the actors of the ecosystem, supporting long-life learning solutions, requalification and improvement of competences, promoting a better alignment between educational systems and labor market gaps. Instead of creating a centralized database, DS4Skills fosters a federated infrastructure, in which providers and data users interact under shared rules and standards, ensuring long-term regulatory compliance, interoperability and sustainability.
EDGE-Skills complements this approach by focusing on the technical implementation and deployment of a data space and infrastructure. Its goal is to create a federated, sovereign and human centric environment, offering plug&play services that allow educational institutions, companies and developers to access data in a safe and efficient manner.
EDGE-Skills provides cloud-to-edge tools for education, training and tourism, guaranteeing that users maintain control over their personal data and professional competencies. Its approach is practical and technical, making possible that actors from the educational and labour ecosystem take advantage of data in a direct manner.
Overall, DS4Skills and EDGE-Skills contribute to the European vision of a trusted, federated and human-centric Skills Data Space, combining strategic governance frameworks and policies with a robust technical infrastructure that boosts innovation, education and employability across Europe.
