In the past few years, the main research efforts regarding General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant data sharing have been focused primarily on informed consent (one of the six GDPR lawful bases for data processing). In cases such as Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) data sharing, when consent might not be enough, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) still depend on contracts—a GDPR basis that is often overlooked due to its complexity. The contract’s lifecycle comprises many stages (e.g., drafting, negotiation, and signing) that must be executed in compliance with GDPR. Despite the active research efforts on digital contracts, contract-based GDPR compliance and challenges such as contract interoperability have not been sufficiently elaborated on yet. Since knowledge graphs and ontologies provide interoperability and support knowledge discovery, we propose and develop a knowledge graph-based tool for GDPR contract compliance verification (CCV). It binds GDPR’s legal basis to data sharing contracts. In addition, we conducted a performance evaluation in terms of execution time and test cases to validate CCV’s correctness in determining the overhead and applicability of the proposed tool in smart city and insurance application scenarios. The evaluation results and the correctness of the CCV tool demonstrate the tool’s practicability for deployment in the real world with minimum overhead.

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The adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has resulted in a significant shift in how the data of European Union citizens is handled. A variety of data sharing challenges in scenarios such as smart cities have arisen, especially when attempting to semantically represent GDPR legal bases, such as consent, contracts and the data types and specific sources related to them. Most of the existing ontologies that model GDPR focus mainly on consent. In order to represent other GDPR bases, such as contracts, multiple ontologies need to be simultaneously reused and combined, which can result in inconsistent and conflicting knowledge representation. To address this challenge, we present the smashHitCore ontology. smashHitCore provides a unified and coherent model for both consent and contracts, as well as the sensor data and data processing associated with them. The ontology was developed in response to real-world sensor data sharing use cases in the insurance and smart city domains. The ontology has been successfully utilised to enable GDPR-complaint data sharing in a connected car for insurance use cases and in a city feedback system as part of a smart city use case.