DAOnt: A Formal Ontology for EU Data Act Compliance

TL;DR

The paper introduces DAOnt, a formal ontology based on RDF that models the EU Data Act to enable automated compliance checking of data sharing agreements across various sectors.

Contribution

It presents a novel ontology that operationalizes key articles of the EU Data Act, integrating existing ontologies for legal compliance reasoning.

Findings

Supports compliance verification via SPARQL queries.

Enables organizations to assess data-sharing agreements against legal requirements.

Provides an online resource with ontology, instances, and example queries.

Abstract

The EU Data Act establishes comprehensive rules governing data access and sharing across business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-government (B2G) contexts. This paper presents a comprehensive ontology for the EU Data Act, enabling reasoning over data sharing agreements through machine-readable representations. The DAOnt ontology reuses elements from three established ontologies, LKIF-Core, ODRL, and DPV, to capture the normative structure of the Data Act. The ontology captures the main concepts and relationships in the Regulation, and it also operationalises three articles to facilitate compliance checking: Article 4(1) (B2C user access rights), Article 8(6) (B2B trade secret exceptions) and Article 19(2)(a) (B2G competitive use prohibitions). The ontology supports compliance checking through SPARQL queries that return obligations, permissions, and prohibitions, allowing organisations to verify whether data-sharing agreements meet the requirements of the EU Data Act and to assess conditions such as FRAND obligations. By representing key legal concepts in RDF, our work helps bridge the gap between the legal provisions of the Data Act and their computational interpretation. The complete ontology, along with example instances and queries, is available online.