The smashHitCore Ontology for GDPR-Compliant Sensor Data Sharing in Smart Cities

Abstract

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.

Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) - Version 2

“…Moreover, ML models were trained with DPV's taxonomies to identify personal data processing activities in code repositories [80,41] and textual datasets [32,33]. DPV's outputs were also used to model access and usage control policies [12,10,16,82], and in particular applied to Solid [20,25,14,13,30,3,19] and health data-sharing use cases [78,61], as well as to describe consent records and contracts for sensor data [49,50]. In the context of data spaces, DPV was used to provide descriptions of health data handling activities [40] and to create user-centric privacy interfaces [36,56,31].…”