A Cross-Regulatory Framework for Balancing Compliance Obligations in Decentralised Settings via Semantic Actor, Rights and Obligations Alignment

Gabriela Kurteva, Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Dave Lewis, Edoardo Celeste

Keywords: Decentralised Data Sharing, Ontologies, Cross-regulatory Compliance, Solid

TL;DR: The use of semantic techniques to align legal concepts for actors, rights and obligations across EU Data regulations towards decentralised environments (Solid Pods) to promote cross-regulatory data governance and compliance.

Abstract: Solid brings data sovereignty back to individuals, but with the emergence of AI and EU data regulations, a concern with its technical implementation may arise. In Solid, enforcement of usage control (i.e. what must be satisfied to allow ‘read’, ‘write’ operations) is limited and decentralisation challenges identifying who holds a role, what the role is, and the legal accountability one must hold. The lack of case laws helping to translate legal principles to fit decentralised environments exacerbates this legal uncertainty. The mainstream of centralised architectures and the societal lack of experience with decentralised technologies compound to this. Transforming EU governance requirements into a usage control policy with a legal ontology Solid Pods can interpret may address the challenge.

Submission Number: 6