Trialog presentation on the use of the Hourglass Model in the Open Community for Research track of the OCX 2026 meeting
Antonio Kung, Cécile Rabrait, Léo Cornec, Diana Jimenez-Bejarano and Estibaliz Arzoz Fernandez from Trialog will present a talk entitled “Using the Hourglass Model for Open Source Development in Research”.
The objective of this talk is to show how the Hourglass Model, adapted by CEI-Sphere to study ICT ecosystems, can lead to the identification of Open Source opportunities in research projects. The Hourglass Model provides a visual map, organised into layers and dual-sided columns to illustrate the relationships between stakeholders on one side, and technologies on the other side. The “technologies” column is further refined into three aspects, capabilities, standards, and Open Source building blocks.
The following link describes the Hourglass Model and its application to the CEI ecosystem in the CEI-Sphere project: https://ceisphere.eu/hourglass-model.
The Hourglass Model has been applied successfully in the past 6 months in a growing number of research projects or ecosystems. In particular, this model has already been used to describe the following ecosystems: data spaces, digital twins, self-sovereign identity, AI, and smart cities.
This talk will explain the five principles driving an Hourglass Model analysis: layering key enablers, ensuring interoperability and reusability, supporting regulations and harmonized standards, leveraging standards and Open Source components, and the four processes defined within CEI-Sphere to help projects performing this analysis.
Then, several cases of Hourglass Model usage to enable the identification of Open Source opportunities in different EU-funded projects will be presented, including the Cloud-Edge-IoT O-CEI project focusing on the development of a digital asset builder system. For each of these projects, we will present the project’s strategy regarding Open Source and standardisation activities, the main Open Source building blocks used or targeted for use in the project as well as lessons learned and recommendations for other research projects.
