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Brussels, Belgium — On November 14, 2024, Peter Jans, Cloud Manager at ACA Group, and Sven Houtmeyers, CTO at Publiq, will join industry leaders at the AWS for Industries Symposium in Brussels to present insights on a pioneering data-driven platform. Developed in collaboration with ACA Group, Publiq, and the Flemish Department of Culture, Youth and Media (CJM), this Data Mesh-enabled platform has been created to revolutionize the Flemish cultural sector by fostering cross-institutional data sharing and enhancing public engagement with cultural offerings.
A platform for resilience and growth in the cultural sector
Amid the challenges posed by the recent pandemic, the Flemish cultural sector has undergone significant strain, prompting a renewed focus on digital transformation as a recovery strategy. This initiative, part of CJM's Targeted Digital Transformation program, aims to connect audiences with cultural events through personalized recommendations and foster informed decision-making among cultural organizers.
By creating a unified cloud-native platform called the UiTwisselingsplatform, CJM promotes data-sharing across a broad cultural network using an ecosystem powered by Linked Open Data and OSLO-standardization. This platform allows cultural data providers and users—ranging from event organizers to policymakers—to benefit from enriched audience insights, optimized ticketing, and streamlined administration, all within a secure, GDPR-compliant environment.
Flanders Digital Awards: A double nomination for impact and sustainability
This collaborative effort has earned CJM two nominations at the 2023 Flanders Digital Awards, recognizing the UiTwisselingsplatform’s transformative and sustainable approach. Competing in the Best Digital Transformation and Most Sustainable Project categories, the project highlights the sector's potential to collectively manage shared infrastructure and reduce redundancy in data entry and analysis, lowering costs and facilitating growth.
Enabling innovation through Data Mesh and Cloud Native principles
Underpinning this platform is the Data Mesh approach, which empowers organizations of varying technological maturity to collaborate effectively within their domains while sharing valuable data as "products." This setup encourages seamless data exchanges between "producers" and "consumers," enabling the cultural sector to scale sustainably and efficiently as more stakeholders join the platform to either access open data or share it with others to build new services and products.
This platform using AWS at it’s core has been extended with Cloud Native toolings mainly Kubernetes, Tekton, etcd, containerD, Harbor, Istio, EFK, KNative, SonarCube, Flux, and Terraform to create a Platform Engineering toolset. This empowers the cloud engineers and the software engineers to focus on what they to best, self-service its needs and have the platform operate by itself with minimal manual interventions, resilience and auto-scaling.

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Recently, we created a Meetup group for data enthusiasts in Belgium who have a keen interest in Data Mesh . It's fantastic to see that the community has grown rapidly and counts almost 100 members! This community serves as a platform for individuals to connect, share their knowledge and collaborate on exciting projects related to data mesh. By bringing together like-minded people, we aim to create a vibrant community that fosters innovation and growth in the field of data management. On the 14th of March, we hosted our first Data Mesh Belgium meetup at our Hasselt office. During this evening, we brought together experts and enthusiasts in the field. Partnering up with two esteemed data experts, Wannes Rosiers and Mathias Lavaert, we were treated to a pair of inspiring talks on the topic of data mesh! The goal of the meetup was to foster knowledge sharing and explore innovative solutions related to this emerging approach. Data mesh is an exciting development in the world of data and software architectures in general, offering a decentralized and distributed approach to building data-driven solutions at scale. The evening started with some delicious pizza and drinks, providing a relaxed atmosphere for attendees to get to know each other a little bit. Then, the experts took the stage to give two talks on various topics related to mata desh. Wannes Rosiers delivered a talk on demystifying data mesh and how to tackle common misconceptions. Mathias Lavaert shared his insights on technical foundations for a data mesh. The talks were insightful and sparked some great discussions among the attendees. At the end of the event, there was an opportunity for attendees to network and share their own experiences with each other. It was a great way to connect with others in the field and learn more about the latest developments in data mesh. The power of data mesh ⚡ Unlike traditional monolithic data architectures, which are difficult to scale and maintain, data mesh is designed to be more decentralized and distributed, with individual domains owning their own data and having their own teams responsible for the data's governance, quality, and delivery. We're excited to see such strong interest in this emerging approach, and look forward to hosting more events in the future to continue the conversation. Thank you to everyone who attended and made this event a success! We're excited to be at the forefront of the data mesh movement. Learn more about our data mesh services by clicking the button below: Check out our Data Mesh Services
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We are thrilled to announce that our very own Tom De Wolf , Data Mesh expert at ACA Group, will be hosting and curating Data Mesh Live 2025 , the new conference dedicated to the Data Mesh community. The event will take place in Antwerp, Belgium, from June 4-6, 2025 , and will be co-located with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) Europe and EventCentric. About Data Mesh Live Data Mesh Live is a community-driven conference, organised by Aardling (aardling.eu) and curated by Tom De Wolf, recognized as a Data Mesh Learning community MVP and organizer of the Data Mesh Belgium Meetup . The conference aims to bring together professionals and enthusiasts to explore the challenges and opportunities in implementing Data Mesh. According to Tom, " There are a lot of challenges and aspects to consider when implementing Data Mesh. Data Mesh Live provides the ideal opportunity to learn from experts in the field and interact with peers who are passionate about Data Mesh. " Why attend Data Mesh Live? Expert insights : Gain knowledge from leading experts covering all four principles of Data Mesh and topics like Platform Architecture, Data Product Management, Federated Governance, and Decentralized Ownership. Community engagement : Network with like-minded professionals and participate in constructive discussions and collaborations. Cross-pollination of ideas : Benefit from the co-location with DDD Europe and EventCentric, fostering cross-disciplinary learning in areas like Domain-Driven Design, Product Thinking, System Thinking, Evolutionary Architectures, Platform Engineering, and Team Topologies. Experience Antwerp : Enjoy the vibrant culture and history of Antwerp while attending the conference. Check out our Data Mesh services! Who should attend? Whether you're a data engineer, data manager, data governance professional, software engineer, architect, or a management-level executive interested in Data Mesh, this conference is for you. It's ideal for anyone involved in or considering embarking on a Data Mesh journey. Tom envisions Data Mesh Live as the annual in-person conference driven by and for the Data Mesh community. " By bringing together like-minded people around Data Mesh, we aim to connect them and trigger constructive discussions and collaborations ," he says. Don't miss this opportunity to be part of a pioneering event that aims to revolutionize Data Management practices. Register now For more information and to register, please visit https://2025.datameshlive.com .
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14 November 2024 - We recently hosted the 4th edition of our Data Mesh Belgium Meetup . For the fourth time, we brought together data enthusiasts and professionals to share trends, insights and innovations in the world of data mesh. Inspiring talks 🎙️ Tom Baeyens “Toddlers, Discipline, and Data Reliability in Data Mesh” Tom shared how the essence of data products in a Data Mesh lies in creating interconnected data components. These components interact through datasets governed by data contracts, quality checks, and component testing. Even without adopting a full organizational data mesh transformation, applying these software engineering best practices to data pipelines is a rising trend to enhance Data Reliability. 🎙️ Frederic Lebeau “Securing Data Mesh Collaboration with Confidential Computing" Frederic delved into Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and confidential computing. He demonstrated how data products can securely process confidential data using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). These environments enable trusted workloads with end-to-end encryption, ensuring that data access remains restricted to the workload itself ( not users) and operates without sharing credentials. We want to thank Soda and DataVillage for partnering with us to make this edition once again a great success! What's next? 💡 Want to stay in the loop for future meetups? Join our community to stay informed about upcoming events. 🗓️ More Data Mesh news! We are excited to share that our very own Tom De Wolf will be hosting and curating Data Mesh Live 2025 , the new conference dedicated to the Data Mesh community. The event will take place in Antwerp, from 4-6 June 2025, and will be co-located with DDD Europe and EventCentric .
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