Reconciling Data Protection Rights and Obligations: An Ontology of the Forthcoming EU Regulation

Knowledge theory has made its way into modern computing, through the use of models and annotations to organize it. The bottom layer of knowledge organizations makes use of ontologies, which are models based on a formal language structure and designed to express the concepts pertaining to a domain and the relationships between them. The use of ontologies is popular also in the legal domain to organize legal documents and as a support to legal reasoning. A legal topic which is currently under the limelight at the European level is data protection. Under the pressure of the last years’ technological developments, the data protection legislation has shown its weaknesses, and is currently undergoing a long and complex reform that is finally approaching its completion. The reform will urge businesses dealing with personal data to comply with the new Regulation. The aim of the current paper is to provide a basic ontology for the upcoming data protection legislation, highlighting the duties of the data controller, to ease the transition of systems and services from the existing legislation to the new one.