FEDeRATED — federated data sharing for EU logistics
Contributed to the master plan and reference implementations for decentralised, multi-modal data exchange across European transport platforms.
Context
The political and operational problem behind FEDeRATED is that European transport spans dozens of countries, hundreds of platforms, and several modes (road, rail, sea, air) — and the data needed to make this efficient is locked inside individual platforms with no shared semantics or governance. The programme's job was to design and prove a federated alternative to centralisation.
Problem
Three real problems. Semantic interoperability — the same concept ('arrival') means different things in different platforms. Governance — who decides what data is shared, with whom, under what terms. Trust — a federated model only works if every participant trusts the others' identity and consent claims. Each of these is solvable; getting them solved together is the hard part.
Approach
On the technical side, this meant ontology work for cross-platform semantics, identity and consent flows that respected each platform's own auth, and a reference adapter pattern so a platform could federate without re-architecting itself. Multi-modal scenarios were proven end to end so the architecture wasn't just road-centric.
Outcome
The reference implementations and architectural patterns continue to feed into follow-on EU programmes. For me personally, this is the work that established the cross-organisation data-sharing experience that very few engineers in this space have hands-on.
What I learned
The technical part is the easy part. Most of the value of working on programmes like FEDeRATED is learning how to scope and ship something useful when the stakeholders include national ministries, vendor consortia, and competitor companies — none of whom have the same incentives.