2 May 2023

Startin’blox team enables European Data Spaces to benefit from intuitive apps to operate their data exchanges, rather than having to interact with data directly.

Learn in this interview with team member Alex Bourlier how ONTOCHAIN is supporting them and how they contribute to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem.

 

Can you briefly present us your team? What’s your story and what drives you?

We are a core team of 4 French co-founders with a strong technical and entrepreneurial background:
- Sylvain and I are entrepreneurs for 10 years each
- Benoît seats at the W3C table and is a world class expert on data standards and interoperability
- Louis is a world expert on B2B cooperation

We met in the context of https://happy-dev.fr, the biggest freelancers network in Europe that we co-founded and scaled to one thousand members.

 

In simple words, what is your project about and how does it contribute to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem?

Startin’blox is an app builder dedicated to data sharing / data spaces.

Apps built with our app builder are:

  • Faster to build
  • Natively interoperable
  • Trustful by design regarding data sharing.

Startin’blox contributes to the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem by enabling the different projects to easily integrate with the other components of our app builder, so developers can easily embed ONTOCHAIN services into their apps.

 

How did you come up with this project idea and what benefits will it bring to the end users?

In the context of https://happy-dev.fr, a few clients demanded us to build interoperable apps. We relied on W3C standards to build them and quickly realised how painful it was to develop such an app and to guarantee the trust within the different data exchanges.

Our end users are European Data Spaces, particularly their member organisations. We offer them the ability to benefit from intuitive apps to operate their data exchanges, rather than having to interact with data directly. This decreases the need for data engineers, save them time, and make the overall user experience of Data Spaces much better.

 

In what way is ONTOCHAIN contributing to your own ambitions?

ONTOCHAIN, as an ecosystem of different players making their services compatible with one another, is facing the exact same challenges as Data Spaces. Unsurprisingly, it is coming up with similar solutions to address them. Therefore, a good part of the work we are doing for the ONTOCHAIN project will be reused in the context of Data Spaces, ie. becoming compatible with the Eclipse Data Connector.

ONTOCHAIN is therefore helping us to be relevant to our prospects and customers.

 

How do you assess the experience of working with other ONTOCHAIN teams? What type of synergies do you want to explore/are already exploring?

Most ONTOCHAIN teams are responsive, experts in their field and friendly. We’re working with the ones we are integrating with our app builder. Some of them, ie. Sphereon or Babelfish, are working with the same standards as us. Outside of the realm of ONTOCHAIN we might rely on their system to delegate part of our technical infrastructure to them, but we haven’t come to a conclusion on this yet.

 

What are your expectations regarding the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem and its contribution to the NGI priority areas?

Our focus is very much on trust, decentralisation, interoperability and data sharing. We believe that those preoccupations are at the core of what ONTOCHAIN is building.