Report of the workshop on Data Privacy Controls and Vocabularies

On 17 and 18 April 2018, some forty people took part in a W3C workshop on data privacy controls and vocabularies, organized by the SPECIAL project. The WU Vienna (Vienna University of Economics and Business) provided the meeting facilities and Stefan Decker (Fraunhofer FIT/RWTH Aachen) and Vassilios Peristeras (Hellenic University) were the chairs.

You can find the full report on the W3C Web site.

The workshop consisted of sessions on four themes, ‘relevant vocabularies and initiatives’, ‘industry perspective’, ‘research topics’ and ‘the governmental side & initiatives’. The workshop ended with a discussion on next steps and more in particular on priorities.

The discussions concluded with a poll to establish the priority of the things that could be standardised. In order from highest to lowest priority, the result is:

1. Taxonomy of regulatory privacy terms (including all GDPR terms).
2. Taxonomy for personal data.
3. Taxonomy of purposes.
4. Taxonomy of disclosure.
5. Metadata related to the details of anonymisation.
6. Log vocabulary.
7. Taxonomy of linkage operations.
8. Taxonomies of human behaviour.

As a next step, the workshop participants encouraged the creation of a ‘Community Group’ at W3C to work on these vocabularies. Since then, the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls CG (DPVCG) has been created. People with an interest in the above topics are encouraged to join.