Funded by the European Commission, TITAN (Trusted envIronments for confidenTiAl computiNg and secure data sharing) it’s a 36-month project that will deliver an open-source software platform focused on enabling secure sensitive data sharing, and demonstrate them in the EOSC ecosystem.
The University of Koblenz, though one of Germany’s newer academic institutions, boasts a Computer Science faculty with over three decades of pioneering research. Dr. Riediger’s work, particularly within the Software Engineering research group, concentrates on critical areas like IT security, data sovereignty, and software quality in complex systems, including cloud-based architectures. His team’s extensive experience in data spaces and related architectures aligns perfectly with the principles underpinning EOSC and TITAN. This makes his insights on secure data sharing and AI analytics particularly valuable for our project.
In this interview, Dr. Riediger shares his in-depth technical insights, including the challenges of harmonising requirements from diverse experts and his “future-shaping” vision for the TITAN Project’s role in building trusted data environments for research.
What motivated University of Koblenz to become a partner in the TITAN-EOSC project?
The Institute for Software Technology of the University of Koblenz is involved in several projects around data spaces, data sovereignty and architectures supporting these aspects. The principles of EOSC in general and TITAN in particular match our expertise and interests very well, and we are happy to contribute our experience in these areas, and to extend it while working on the project. Additionally, TITAN is especially interesting for us as a university, because it will probably directly influence the way we are sharing research data with other researchers in future. Besides this it opens opportunities for teaching and education by diving into detailed research topics within the context of TITAN.
Can you briefly describe your organization’s main role and key responsibilities within the TITAN-EOSC project?
A large amount of our efforts in the TITAN-EOSC project is dedicated to leading the requirements engineering task within work package 1, responsible for the elicitation and management of technical requirements for secure data sharing and processing within the EOSC ecosystem. In our roles as leader of that particular task and contributor to further tasks within work package 1, we were able to bring in our experience in the requirements engineering domain and apply best practices to the whole requirements management process within the TITAN-EOSC process.
In your leading role in work package 1, University of Koblenz developed and guided the requirements elicitation and management process. What are the most critical aspects you’re considering when dealing with requirements in such an important and innovative project and which were the challenges you had to deal with in the project?
One big challenge was to bring together experts from different domains and to establish a structured process. What works well in established teams of software engineers was difficult to achieve within a project with that many partners with highly different experience and background in various domains. Despite of these challenges, the project came up with a comprehensive requirements list that will be further refined in the remaining tasks.
What is your vision for the long-term impact of the TITAN-EOSC platform on the broader research community and the EOSC ecosystem?
Our vision is to contribute to the design of a platform architecture that follows the principles of the European Data Strategy and will enable the society to make more conscious decisions in ecological, health related, economical and political questions, based on scientific data.
If you had to describe the project in a few words, what would it be?
Future-shaping.
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