Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG) repository containing specifications for Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) and its extensions, primer, and guides, and group meeting minutes.
| links: Community Group | GitHub wiki |
The mission of the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls CG (DPVCG) is to develop a taxonomy of privacy and data protection related terms, which include in particular terms from the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), such as a taxonomy of personal data as well as a classification of purposes (i.e., purposes for data collection), and events of disclosures, consent, and processing such personal data.
License: All work produced by DPVCG and provided through this repo or elsewhere is provided by contributors under the W3C Document License unless otherwise noted. A copy of the license is provided in the LICENSE.md file.
Guidelines for suggesting new concepts, identifying bugs and issues, and sending patches or PRs
Newcomers to the DPV are recommended to start with the Primer to familiarise themselves with the concepts, semantics, and usefulness of the DPV. A Concise Primer is also available for a quick (2-pager) introduction to DPV.
The Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) provides an ontology (classes and properties) along with taxonomies that represent real-world uses of these concepts for representing information regarding how (personal) data and technologies (including AI). For example, it provides concepts and taxonomies to represent:
The versionless base IRI, e.g.
https://w3id.org/dpv, always points to the latest release which is a versioned IRI, e.g.https://w3id.org/dpv/2.1for v2.1.
The namespace for DPV terms is http://w3id.org/dpv# with suggested prefix dpv, and serialisations are provided in RDF/XML, Turtle, JSON-LD, and N3 formats. The default serialisations are defined using RDFS/SKOS semantics, with an alternate serialisation defined using OWL2 semantics.
These extensions provide additional concepts that extend the concepts and scope of the main DPV specification:
In v2.1, the Sector and Standard group of extensions was added to the DPV specifications. Sector provides sector-specific concepts which extend concepts in other DPV extensions. Currently, the following sectors are represented: -SECTOR-EDUCATION for Education Sector -SECTOR-FINANCE for Finance Sector -SECTOR-HEALTH for Health Sector -SECTOR-INFRA for (Critical) Infrastructure Sector -SECTOR-LAW for Law Enforcement & Justice Sector -SECTOR-PUBLICSERVICES for Public Services Sector
The Standards extensions are aimed to provide additional concepts for implementing specific standards using DPV. Currently it contains IEEE-P7012 based on IEEE P7012 Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.
The LEGAL extensions provide concepts associated with specific jurisdictions and the laws, authorities, and treaties within them. The Legal page provides an overview of these. The jurisdictions are represented by using their ISO 3166-2 codes.
The NACE Taxonomy serialised in RDFS provides a serialisation of the NACE v2 taxonomy in RDFS for use with DPV terms. Since then, NACE v2.1 has been published by the EU Commission. The DPVCG has decided to retire/not provide an alternative serialisation of NACE as it provided no significant benefit and the best practice for using NACE is to always utilise the official authoritative version.
In addition to the above, we welcome participation in the following guides being developed:
Releases are provided through the GitHub feature at https://github.com/w3c/dpv/releases and contain zipped collections of DPV specifications, modules, extensions, and accompanying documents.
The following are final reports i.e. formally published by the W3C. Note that works considered to be in a ‘draft’ state are not formally published in this manner.
If you’re unsure about something, or would like clarifications, or suggestions - please communicate with us or open an issue. We would be happy to help. You can view the current open issues and the public mailing list.
Membership to the group is open to all interested individuals and organisations. To join the group, you need a valid W3C account – which is free to get and can be requested here. The group meets usually through online meeting calls - see meetings calendar and minutes.
The DPVCG was established as part of the SPECIAL H2020 Project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 731601 from 2017 to 2019.
Harshvardhan J. Pandit was funded to work as the chair of DPVCG from 2020 to 2022 by the Irish Research Council's Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant#GOIPD/2020/790, and through the ADAPT SFI Centre for Digital Media Technology is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the SFI Research Centres Programme and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through Grant#13/RC/2106 (2018 to 2020) and Grant#13/RC/2106_P2 (2021 onwards).
Further funding acknowledgements for individual members are provided within relevant specifications.