ZeroW addresses the need to move from today’s fragmented solutions targeted on isolated food loss and waste (FLW) problems to synergised solutions based on shared data, knowledge, and collective intelligence - breaking siloed solutions and ‘opening’ closed ecosystems. This will be done by creating a OFLW dataspace.

How it works

A dataspace is a cooperation of organizations with common agreements about the exchange of information from a legal, organizational, semantical, and technical point of view.

The objective is to make it easier and cheaper for participants of a dataspace to exchange information in a secure and controlled way without dependencies to a monopolist or a vendor.

A successful launch

On the 6th of October, the first version of the ZeroW 0FLW dataspace was rolled out by TNO.

The focus laid on creating the infrastructure that is needed to securely exchange information between participants. Participants of the 0FLW data space can be all types of organizations in the food value chain who wish to use it for exchanging FLW information such as farmers, food companies, retailers, etc. 

In this first version, participants can either join via a service provider that provides all the necessary components as services to the participant or by deploying a connector on their own infrastructure.

A connector is a standardized software solution for secure exchange of information within a dataspace. The ZeroW partners ITC, Konnecta, and Inlecom have already started their connector deployments. The connector, with accompanying documentation, is available as open source at GitLab*.  
 

The next steps

The next steps are to specify what information will be shared in the dataspace and how the interaction patterns should look to exchange meaningful information, powered by the Vocabulary Hub that will be made available next year.

Vocabulary Hub is an online community platform for data models and vocabularies that gives vocabulary providers the tools they need to facilitate semantic interoperability. And in parallel, a governance model of the dataspace must be formed which defines the admission policy and code of conduct so that each participant knows what to expect from the dataspace. All participants must agree to comply to the collectively agreed governance model and admission rules.
 
The efforts so far have been focused on the technical aspects, so there is not much to see yet. Our ambition for the upcoming months is to create an easy entry landing page to get familiar with the benefits of sharing information about food waste with help of an 0FLW dataspace. 

Important updates on the dataspace will be shared later, so stay tuned and prepare for being connected.