Abstract
Consent is an important legal basis for the processing of personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is the current European data protection law. GPDR provides constraints and obligations on the validity of consent, and provides data subjects with the right to withdraw their consent at any time. Determining and demonstrating compliance to these obligations require information on how the consent was obtained, used, and changed over time. Existing work demonstrates feasibility of semantic web technologies in modelling information and determining compliance for GDPR. Although these address consent, they currently do not model all the information associated with it. In this paper, we address this by first presenting our analysis of information associated with consent under the GDPR. We then present GConsent, an OWL2-DL ontology for representation of consent and its associated information such as provenance. The paper presents the methodology used in the creation and validation of the ontology as well as an example use-case demonstrating its applicability. The ontology and this paper can be accessed online at https://w3id.org/GConsent.
Keywords
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- 1.
This is a form of legal notation to denote Recitals (Rec) or Articles (Art) in legal text. These are hyperlinked to where they occur in GDPR using GDPRtEXT [14].
- 2.
The recent decision by CNIL (Décision n\(^{\circ }\)MED-2018-042 du 30 octobre 2018) regarding validity of consent was particularly influential.
- 3.
Although the legal basis for obtaining this data under the GDPR could be interpreted as legitimate interest or benefit of data subject, it highlights the recording of information associated with such consent. The example also highlights the potential applicability of GConsent to scenarios other than GDPR such medical consent where additional laws and guidelines apply regarding consent.
- 4.
The nurse is the agent that assumes and collects the given consent of the patient, making it an implicit consent given by delegation.
- 5.
Punning allows reuse of types. See https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-new-features/#F12:_Punning.
- 6.
Example: privacy policies which mention consent for data categories such as “Account Information” rather than specific instances.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology, which is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund.
The authors wish to thank the members of Data Protection Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG) for their inputs in the discussion of consent and its related research. The authors also wish to thank Pat McBennett for their help in this work.
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Pandit, H.J., Debruyne, C., O’Sullivan, D., Lewis, D. (2019). GConsent - A Consent Ontology Based on the GDPR. In: Hitzler, P., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11503. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_18
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