Hannover, March 31, 2025 – Hannover Messe 2025, the world’s leading industrial trade fair, welcomed around 127,000 visitors from across the globe this year. (Source: Kipar 2025, available online at: industry-of-things.de) The spotlight was on this year’s partner country, Canada, which showcased its innovation strengths in areas such as artificial intelligence, clean technologies, and sustainable industry under the motto “The future’s here.”
The Gaia-X lighthouse project COOPERANTS used this international stage to unveil the first Gaia-X data space for the aerospace industry. At the Gaia-X booth in Hall 8, Hauke Ernst presented the project from a strategic perspective, offering a comprehensive overview of the goals, structure, significance, and future of the COOPERANTS data space and marketplace.
A particular highlight was the presentation of the augmented reality service HOLOWORK, showcased during the panel “The Need for Data Sharing – Best Practices in Sharing and Monetizing Data.” This application demonstrated how users can be supported during assembly, integration, and testing processes using a HoloLens, which displays step-by-step, visualized 3D work instructions. HOLOWORK can be booked via the COOPERANTS marketplace and securely operated through the COOPERANTS data space.
This use case from the aerospace industry vividly illustrated how Gaia-X standards such as Single Source of Truth (SSOT), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and rule-based sharing of sensitive data are being successfully applied in practice.
On the Gaia-X stage, Udo Corleis, Managing Director of RADIUSMEDIA and COOPERANTS consortium partner, stated: “Today, I had the opportunity to present HOLOWORK and COOPERANTS on the Gaia-X stage. With HOLOWORK, we were able to vividly demonstrate just how dynamic, practical, and secure Gaia-X truly is.”
His message to small and medium-sized enterprises was clear: “Start with Gaia-X now, take the lead, and stay the course. It’s worth it.”
The response at the Gaia-X booth was remarkable: Over the course of the day, it turned into a genuine hotspot – featuring lively discussions, including exchanges with an international delegation from Korea.
Hannover Messe 2025 impressively demonstrated how international collaboration and innovative technologies go hand in hand. COOPERANTS stands as a pioneering example of data-driven collaboration based on European values – proving that the connected industry is no longer just a vision, but rapidly becoming reality.
