Semantic Interoperability, a facilitator of the GDPR right to access

Every year, the International Data Protection Day is celebrated on 28 January to raise awareness on the rights available to all individuals in relation to personal data protection. In the EU context, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) added new rights and reinforced existing ones to allow individuals to exercise more control over their personal information. Semantic interoperability can facilitate enforcement of some of these rights, for example the right to access your data. 

The right to access allows us, the data subjects, to request access to our personal data which public and private entities store and use. However, when public and private entities receive a “right-to-access request” from a data subject, one common hurdle is to locate and compile all the relevant personal data. This is because personal data are often spread in different systems and among third parties, making it considerably difficult to accommodate such requests. Moreover, various ways of data mapping and identifying semantically leads to difficulties in exchanging information between organisations. 
 

Try e-Government Core Person Vocabulary

Semantic interoperability can play a role in facilitating this process for public and private entities. It can help in complying with the current regulation and ensuring the adequate respect of the data subject´s rights via the use of e-Government Core Vocabularies developed under the ISA² SEMIC action. 

These are ‘simplified, reusable, and extensible data models that capture the fundamental characteristics of an entity in a context-neutral manner.’ The e-Government Core Person Vocabulary does so by ‘capturing the fundamental characteristics’ of the data subjects.

The use of the Core Person Vocabulary allows organisations to respond to access requests by facilitating the identification of the personal data categories in all relevant IT systems and third parties involved. This contributes to accelerating the handling of requests and reducing the administrative burden, notably by automating the process.

The SEMIC Action also conducted a study looking into how Core Vocabularies can support another GDPR right, the right to data portability. The study  provides insights on how public and private entities can comply with this EU regulation using semantic interoperability vocabularies.

SEMIC is a semantic interoperability action under the ISA² Programme. It facilitates a European community of semantic interoperability practitioners and provides solutions to help European public administrations in data meaningful exchanges across borders and domains.

The SEMIC Team