You have reached the former access point to an ambitious research and innovation project named SPECIAL (European Commission funded grant no. 731601) that ran over a 3-year period from 2017 to 2019. We are maintaining this web site for documentation purposes, as SPECIAL contributed to advance the state of the art by delivering technology to reconcile the contradiction between Big Data innovation and data protection compliance requirements. SPECIAL solutions are based on the principles of privacy by design and privacy by default. Concretely, SPECIAL results have the potential for significant impact on Policy Language and Vocabularies, prototypes of dashboards and consent and control UI, reusable architectural components and other. Over 40 scientific articles were published during the project lifetime.
We invite you to explore the information and deliverables archived on this site, and for further inquiries related to SPECIAL and it's follow-up activities, please contact ERCIM Projects Office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The SPECIAL project (Scalable Policy-aware Linked Data Architecture For Privacy, Transparency and Compliance) addresses the contradiction between Big Data innovation and data protection compliance requirements by proposing a technical solution that makes the achievement of both of these goals realistic. SPECIAL allows citizens and organisations to share more data, while guaranteeing compliance with data protection, thus enabling both trust and the creation of valuable new insights from shared data.
We develop technology that:
- supports the acquisition of user consent at collection time and the recording of both data and metadata (consent policies, event data, context) according to legislative and user-specified policies;
- caters for privacy-aware, secure workflows that include usage/access control, transparency and compliance verification;
- demonstrates robustness in terms of performance, scalability and security, all of which are necessary to support privacy preserving innovation in Big Data environments; and
- provides a dashboard with feedback and control features that make privacy in Big Data comprehensible and manageable for data subjects, controllers, and processors.
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SPECIAL:
Scalable Policy-awarE linked data arChitecture for prIvacy, trAnsparency and compLiance
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About SPECIAL: Aims
Data subjects who would like to declare, monitor and optionally revoke their (often not explicit) preferences on data sharing 
Regulators who can leverage technical means to check compliance with the GDPR 
Companies whose business models rely on personal data and for which the GDPR is both a challenge and an opportunity -
SPECIAL Objectives
- Policy management framework
- Gives users control of their personal data
- Represents usage policies, legislative requirements and business policies in a machine readable format
- Transparency and compliance framework
- Provides information on how data is processed and with whom it is shared
- Allows data subjects to take corrective action
- Allows companies to verify that processing is in line with data subject usage policies and legal requirements
- Scalable policy-aware Linked Data architecture
- Build on top of the Big Data Europe (BDE) platform scalability and elasticity mechanisms
- Extended BDE with robust policy, transparency and compliance protocols
- Enable personal data value chains
- Pilot implementation and evaluation
- The architecture will be validated in the context of personal data sharing use cases for the telecoms and financial services sectors
- Collaboration, Dissemination & Standardisation
- Create real-world impact in the form of a sustainable solution that we disseminate actively
- Policy management framework
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SPECIAL Use Cases
![[image: home screen of the app ‘events at the Belgian coast’]](/images/ressources/photos/proximus-use-case.png)
![[image: home screen of the ‘speedtest’ app ]](/images/ressources/photos/tlabs-use-case.png)
![[image: logo of the ‘know your customer’ app]](/images/ressources/photos/tr-use-case.png)
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations – A Walk-Through
![[diagram]](/images/illustrations/SPECIAL_flow_image.svg)
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
SPECIAL leverages past infrastructure and lessons learned, such as
- Big Data Europe scalability and elasticity
- PrimeLife policy languages, access control policies, release policies and data handling policies
- The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) and the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) vocabularies
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
SPECIAL uses the Linked Data paradigm
- All data items are identified by Internationalised Resource Identifiers (IRI’s)
- By using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) IRI’s, everything is potentially linkable
- IRI’s allow SPECIAL to associate usage constraints with personal data at different levels of granularity
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
SPECIAL handles a broad variety of sources and formats
- Integration with Line of Business applications via transformation middleware
- Understanding the personal data that is stored, how it is used, and what constraints are associated with the data needs to be captured in a personal data processing inventory
- Allowing for the development of an Intelligent Data Lake
Want to learn more?
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
SPECIAL records and applies usage constraints to personal data processing and sharing
- Tightly coupled to the legal process of enquiry (data, processing, purpose, storage and recipients)
- A privacy-by-design approach allows for conscious decisions about data collection and data (re)use
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
When sharing data or querying results, information is securely stored and securely exchanged
- Enable efficient queryable encryption based on compressed RDF data
- Encryption is used for data and policy integrity
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
Policy information is glued to the payload data, even across company borders, as ‘sticky policies’
- Policy-constrained personal data sharing
- Legal guarantees
- Integrity and non-repudiation
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
SPECIAL categorizes and subdivides data, based on fine-grained usage-policies and sensitivity categories/levels
- Tackling consent challenges via layering, context, transparency and control
- Retrieving policies based on data
- Policy aware aggregation and anonymisation techniques
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SPECIAL Technical Foundations
Novel ways of obtaining consent and providing transparency are explored
- Consent: displaying highly relevant information to the user based on context while providing a dynamic consent approach
- Interactive Dashboard: Giving users an effective way to access data, usage constraints, data processing, and data sharing
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Work packages and interconnectedness
![[diagram]](/images/ressources/project_plan2.png)
Our vision will be realised and validated via real world use cases that – in order to be viable – need to overcome current challenges concerning the processing and sharing of data in a privacy preserving manner. In order to realise this vision, we will combine and significantly extend big data architectures to handle Linked Data, harness them with sticky policies as well as scalable queryable encryption, and develop advanced user interaction and control features: SPECIAL will build on top of the Big Data Europe and PrimeLife projects, exploit their results, and further advance the state of the art of privacy enhancing technologies.
WU is the technical coordinator of the project. The consortium partners are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz (ULD), the Centro Regionale Information Communication Technology (CeRICT), the Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin), TenForce, PROXIMUS/Belgacom, Deutsche Telekom AG and Thomson Reuters.
The SPECIAL project is a Research and Innovation Action funded under the H2020-ICT-2016-1 Big Data PPP call (Privacy-preserving Big Data technologies, ICT-18-2016). The project started on the 1st of January 2017 and will continue for three years.
☛ Download the flyer (PDF)
☛ Go to our publications page
☛ Go to our resources overview
Project news
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Report: Beyond Privacy: Learning Data Ethics
This event report presents the key take-aways and lessons learned during the Beyond Privacy: Learning Data Ethics – European Big Data Community Forum 2019 held in Brussels on November 14, 2019.
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SPECIAL Webinar announcement on BDV platform for Nov 29th 2019
GDPR Consent, Transparency and Automated Compliance Checking - The SPECIAL Approach
See also project news
BDV PPP
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SPECIAL engagement in the BDV PPP
SPECIAL participates in the Public-Private Partnership ‘Big Data Value’ (BDV PPP).
Standardisation
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SPECIAL activity in W3C standardisation
On May 25th 2018, SPECIAL launched the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG).
Other news
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Data Protection Aspects of Online Shopping
A short article by Bud Bruegger et al. for the DVPCG shows how GDPR terms apply to a typical online-shopping scenario.
See also other news
This project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 
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