During her address at the State of the Union 2020, President of the European Commission, Ursula von den Leyen, has explicitly recognised that as far as personalised data (i.e. business to consumer) is concerned, Europe has been too slow and is now dependent on others, that is, on US-based companies.
With industrial data, this scenario is simply not an option. European companies, SMEs, start-ups, and researchers must be given the opportunity to draw on their full potential by leveraging the humongous quantity of data that industry generates, 80% of which is wasted.
As with natural resources, the lifecycle of data must be increased, and value must be extracted as much as possible. Which implies, of course, a strong semantic basis (ontologies, knowledge architectures, linked-data paradigms) but also fully-fledged interoperability and the technological capabilities to compete with cloud providers worldwide. GAIA-X, the new pan-European federated data infrastructure, will become the keystone of a digital sovereignty for Europe.