The Chair of Information Management was represented at the Second International Eclipse Tractus-X Hackathon at ARENA2036 in Stuttgart on 6 November 2026. Ingolf Gehrhardt attended the single-day community event as a representative of the IDTA Research Hub Semiconductor. The call of the Eclipse Tractus-X community brought together 21 developers from Spain, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, India and Germany, 16 of them onsite and 5 online. The event was supported by ARENA2036, Catena-X, the Eclipse Foundation, and CGI.

Following the first edition in Bilbao in February 2026, the hackathon focused on redesigning the Eclipse Tractus-X portal, the entry point through which companies register and onboard into a data space. The goal was to make the portal more clearly arranged for operators and applicants seeking access to the data space. To achieve this, a modular architecture was chosen that performs better and is easier to maintain. The day started with a design thinking phase on today's onboarding process before the teams began building the first pieces of the new architecture in the open Eclipse Tractus-X repositories.

All AI agents and models were permitted for development. The participants chose their preferred tools themselves, with GitHub Copilot and Claude dominating the choice. Within one day, the teams produced 131,285 lines of code in 192 commits and 42 pull requests. The result is a modular and decentralized portal design with API-oriented interfaces and the option to connect AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). One feature deserves a special mention: the connection to the EUDI Wallet, the European Digital Identity Wallet established by eIDAS 2.0.

Ingolf Gehrhardt was part of Team 2, which developed the Company component. It maps how a company is registered in the data space and connected to its central services. The team secured third place. First place went to Team 5 with the Notifications component, ahead of Team 6 with the new portal user interface.

The results are available in the open repositories Dataspace Management Services and Dataspace Management UI and will be developed further there together with the community. A first outlook on the new components will be given at the Seventh Eclipse Tractus-X Community Days on 3 and 4 December 2026, also held at ARENA2036 in Stuttgart. At this year's developer panel, Ingolf Gehrhardt will discuss AI-assisted and agentic software development in open source together with other representatives from various industries.