DAOnt: A Formal Ontology for EU Data Act Compliance
Organizations: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
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.
Figures & tables
| \cellcolor [HTML]EFEFEF CQG1. General CQs (9 CQs) | \cellcolor [HTML]EFEFEF CQG2. CQs Related to PoC Articles (3 CQs) |
| CQ1. Who shares data with whom, and under what agreement? CQ2. What actions has a party performed? CQ3. What obligations does a party have? CQ4. Who manufactured a product? CQ5. Who uses a product? CQ6. What service does a product provide? CQ7. When does a legal rule apply? CQ8. Where does data come from? CQ9. Who holds the data? | CQ10. Which data holders have violated Article 4(1) by failing to provide requested data from connected products? CQ11. Which data holders have violated Article 8(6) by refusing data sharing without providing trade secret justification? CQ12. Which public sector bodies have violated Article 19(2)(a) by developing competing products or services using data obtained through B2G data sharing? |
| Aspect | Article 4(1) B2C | Article 8(6) B2B | Article 19(2)(a) B2G |
| Legal Text | ”shall make data available without undue delay” | ”not required to make data available where data constitute trade secrets” | ”shall not use data to develop competing products” |
| Deontic Type | Obligation ( odrl:Duty ) | Permission ( odrl:Permission ) | Prohibition ( odrl:Prohibition ) |
| Condition | User requests data access | B2B request + trade secret | None (unconditional) |
| Action | provideDataAction | refuseDataAccessAction | UseDataToDevelopCompetingProduct |
| Exception | None | containsTradeSecretCondition | None |
| Assignee | Data holder (must act) | Data holder (may refuse) | Public sector body (cannot act) |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Knowledge Representation
Knowledge representation studies how to encode facts, concepts, rules, context, and uncertainty so machines can interpret and reason over them.
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