Beyond Europe’s Digital Infrastructure: How A European Service-Oriented Architecture Approach Can Ensure That Europe’s Digital Infrastructure Delivers

Europe is facing a modernisation challenge. The European Commission guided by President Von der Leyen put the creation of solid foundations for a digital Europe at the centre of its first mandate. Five years later, after the European elections in 2024, the focus has shifted to Europe’s competitiveness, innovation and sovereignty. At the same time, this brought back the focus on Europe’s digital infrastructure and its ownership. Europe continues to invest heavily in digital infrastructure, yet consistently neglects the essential service layer these infrastructures are meant to enable.[1]

A Relentless Focus On Services 

The reason why this is important is strikingly simple as it is fundamental: services (and products) are what ultimately deliver value to the people. Much as the purpose of building the transport infrastructure is to provide people with opportunities for mobility - read the mobility service - the purpose of building the digital infrastructure should also be the provision of services (and products) in healthcare, energy, climate action and so on. The need for a focus on user needs has been already captured by the community, for instance Europe’s flagship community working on data spaces already wrote about data products.[2] Developing data products means, in short, delivering all you need to have to use data for a certain product or service. Developing the service layer is and must be today’s imperative in Europe’s complex digital landscape because developing and delivering services first means putting the creation of value for the real world first.[3]

Why Is It A Modernisation Issue?

A relentless focus on services is nothing new: what is missing is a European strategy focused on delivering around key services. 

European companies, large and small, already focus on the creation of services. In the technology industry this is called service-first approach and it starts from the basic principle that technology and the technological infrastructure must serve a purpose, address a need. This need is shaped by the end user and delivering services to meet these needs is the core principle around which the technology infrastructure is built.[4]

A similar pattern emerges in the environmental domain. As the European Data Market case on in-situ environmental data shows, Europe has world-class infrastructures for satellite and in-situ monitoring, but the absence of a coherent service layer prevents these assets from being used effectively.[5] The Lizard platform developed by Nelen & Schuurmans shows just this;[6] fragmented datasets, incompatible formats and missing integration tools prevented practitioners from building usable climate services. By introducing a unified, service-oriented layer that integrated satellite data, in-situ measurements and modelling outputs, the system finally became operational for real-world use. It is a clear illustration that focusing on a service-oriented approach is the only way to ensure that Europe’s digital infrastructure delivers.

Europe does not need to reinvent the wheel nor to go on any uncharted path, it just needs to modernise its approach to technology development and adopt standard practices in software development for the European software architecture - its digital public infrastructure.

Natural Disaster Management Services and The TEMA Community

TEMA’s case is paradigmatic. In fact this is acknowledged by the project’s overarching goal of developing Natural Disaster Management-as-a-Service. 

Services added value for their users and the real world does not come as a natural consequence of their development and for this it must be proven. Evaluating services transparently is a necessary condition to ensure adoption. This means publishing findable, accessible, interoperable and reliable (FAIR) data about services quality. In TEMA, relevant metrics are for example accuracy and speed of forecasting models. Metrics alone are not enough. Usefulness must be “measured” in the user terms. TEMA again offers a paradigmatic example. Accuracy and speed of forecasting models translates into better deployment of first responders during wildfires and floods, which in turn translates into potentially less risks for them, more lives saved and an overall better management of an emergency such as wildfires or floods with avoided damages and destruction. Finally, excellent quality services that work well for the users and satisfy their needs is the precondition for local impact, to reach a sizable scale there needs to be structural support. This is ensured by securing the necessary infrastructure in place. Policy measures should be designed to support the whole system and soft infrastructure such as standards should be developed and enforced so as to create a leveled playing field for all actors in Europe.

Natural-Disaster-Management-as-a-Service Initiative

To deliver on Europe’s digital infrastructure and create the intended services market, the Horizon project TEMA is bridging its ambitions for impact with Europe’s need to move beyond infrastructure investment and finally build the service architecture that makes it matter. 

In this spirit, TEMA is launching a new community-led initiative designed to complement the European Commission’s investments in infrastructure with services built from the ground up, shaped directly by the operational needs of users and practitioners.

This initiative will be presented in an upcoming webinar on the European services for disaster-management, which will also feature a presentation of the latest EU Data Market Story on closing the service gap in this field.[7]

Subscribe to the TEMA newsletter to receive timely updates join this initiative on European services for disaster management at this link. 

[1]  Read the argument for this here: The Service Gap: Europe’s International Digital Strategy 2025 - The Lisbon Council

[2] Read about data products here: New paper: "Elevating Data Quality A Paradigm Shift for Data Spaces and AI Needs" - BDV Big Data Value Association

[3] The Service Gap: Europe’s International Digital Strategy 2025 - The Lisbon Council

[4] For an explanation of the principles of service oriented architectures read this: 8 Principles of Service-Oriented Architecture: Is SOA Dead? | MuleSoft Blog

[5] Access and read the full story here: The European Data Market study 2024-2026 | Shaping Europe’s digital future

[6] Explore the Lizard platform functionalities here: Lizard.NET

[7] Read the Story 4 on Unlocking the Value of In-Situ Environmental Monitoring Data to the Benefit of the EU Data Economy Update of the European Data Market October, 2025 European DATA Market Study 2024–2026 CNECT/LUX/2023/OP/0043 here: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/european-data-market-study-2024-2026