Semantics for Implementing Data Reuse and Altruism under EU's Data Governance Act

Purpose: Following the impact of the GDPR on the regulation of the use of personal data of European citizens, the European Commission is now focused on implementing a common data strategy to promote the (re)use and sharing of data between citizens, companies and governments while maintaining it under the control of the entities that generated it. In this context, the Data Governance Act (DGA) emphasizes the altruistic reuse of data and the emergence of data intermediaries as trusted entities that do not have an interest in analysing the data itself and act only as enablers of the sharing of data between data holders and data users.

Methodology: In order to address DGA’s new requirements, this work investigates how to apply existing Semantic Web vocabularies to (1) generate machine-readable policies for the reuse of public data, (2) specify data altruism consent terms and (3) create uniform registers of data altruism organisations and intermediation services’ providers.

Findings: In addition to promoting machine-readability and interoperability, the use of the identified semantic vocabularies eases the modelling of data-sharing policies and consent forms across different use cases and provides a common semantic model to keep a public register of data intermediaries and altruism organisations, as well as records of their activities. Since these vocabularies are openly accessible and easily extendable, the modelling of new terms that cater to DGA-specific requirements is also facilitated.

Value: The main results are an ad-hoc vocabulary with the new terms and examples of usage, which are available at https://w3id.org/dgaterms. In future research, this work can be used to automate the generation of documentation for the new DGA data-sharing entities and be extended to deal with requirements from other data-related regulations.