The SPECIAL-K Personal Data Processing Transparency and Compliance Platform

Primary obligations include obtaining explicit consent from the data subject for the processing of personal data and providing full transparency with respect to processing and sharing. With the coming into effect of the GDPR in May 2018, several tools [11, 16, 19] have recently been developed that can be used to assist companies to assess the compliance of their systems and processes with respect to obligations set forth in the GDPR. However, such tools are targeted at self assessment (i.e. companies complete standard questionnaires in the form of a privacy impact assessment) and cannot be used to automatically check compliance with usage constraints. Such, automated transparency and compliance mechanisms would require not only machine-readable representations of the users consent, but also machine-readable representations of data processing and sharing. SPECIAL 1 is an EU H2020 research and innovation action, which addresses these challenges by demonstrating how Semantic Web technologies can be used for both consent and personal data processing representation and compliance checking. In particular we devise a suite of ontologies and vocabularies that can be used to: (i) model data usage policies, conforming the SPECIAL's Usage Policy Language, (ii) represent data processing and sharing events in a semantic log. Both of which have been developed in close collaboration with legal experts, thus ensuring that our automated compliance checking is tightly coupled with the legal assessment process.1 https://www.specialprivacy.eu/ 1 arXiv:2001.09461v1