Collaborating across borders: Lessons from NIIS and the X-Road journey

This talk, presented by Petteri Kivimäki from the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, explores how open-source digital infrastructure facilitates secure, cross-border data exchange. The presentation highlights the evolving role of X-Road, a key product for secure data sharing, which uses a decentralised architecture while ensuring centralised coordination for trust and interoperability. Kivimäki discusses the four-corner model that replaces traditional point-to-point integrations with security servers for authentication and data management, and illustrates how federation between ecosystems supports standardised interfaces and the once-only principle. The session also delves into the transition of X-Road toward a data space architecture, emphasizing the integration of standard protocols and Eclipse Data Space Components to enhance interoperability with existing systems.