DGAterms - A vocabulary to describe information flows in the Data Governance Act (DGA)

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), along with the proposed visions for Data Spaces and Data Act, 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.

In particular, in order to address DGA's new requirements, this work investigates how to apply Semantic Web vocabularies, such as the W3C's Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV), Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) or Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), to

(1) generate machine-readable policies for the reuse of public data,

(2) specify data altruism consent terms, and

(3) create uniform registries of data altruism organisations and intermediation services' providers

as the usage of such technologies promotes machine readability and interoperability. In addition, the use of open semantic vocabularies eases the comparison of data-sharing policies across different use cases and thereby accelerates the development and sharing of best practices for the European altruistic and trusted data intermediary sectors.

Repository Contents

The repository contains the following work:

• ./docs contains the vocabulary HTML documentation and TTL serialisation
• ./vocabulary-terms contains two spreadsheets with the vocabulary's classes and properties
• ./examples contains a list of RDF examples that use DGAterms to specify ODRL policies, registers of activities, SPARQL queries and more

---

This work was accepted to be presented at the Research & Innovation Track of the 19th International Conference on Semantic Systems.

Work developed by:

Beatriz Esteves, Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel: Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

Harshvardhan J. Pandit: ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland

Dave Lewis: ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland