Standardisation, Data Interoperability, and GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has changed the ecosystem of services involving personal data and information. It emphasises several obligations and rights, amongst which the Right to Data Portability requires providing a copy of the given personal data in a commonly used, structured, and machine-readable format – for interoperability. The GDPR thus explicitly motivates the use and adoption of data interoperability concerning information. This chapter explores the entities and their interactions in the context of the GDPR to provide an information model for the development of interoperable services. The model categorises information and exchanges and explores existing standards and efforts towards use for interoperable interactions. The chapter concludes with an argument for the use and adoption of structured metadata to enable more expressive services through semantic interoperability.