Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG)
The mission of the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG) is to develop ontologies and taxonomies that support the implementation of regulations, standards, and approaches relevant to privacy and data protection, and how these are addressed or implemented in technologies, including AI technologies
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 calendar and past minutes). The group also interacts through a mailing list regarding topics, discussions, sharing of agendas, actions, and other relevant items. A GitHub repo is used for collaborative development and hosting of resources.
The group is currently chaired by:
- Harshvardhan J. Pandit (AI Accountability Lab, ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin)
- Beatriz Esteves (KNoWS group at IDLab, Ghent University – imec)
Past chairs:
- Bert Bos (ERCIM W3C)
- Axel Polleres (WU Wirschaftsuniversitat Wien – Vienna University of Economics and Business)
See the Charter for the scope and deliverables of the group. The wiki contains submission guidelines and other help pages. Anyone can use the mailing list or the GitHub repo to ask questions, suggest topics, raise issues, and offer solutions. (note: on mailing lists, non-members might receive an automated reply asking them to authenticate their email or email address for posting. Similarly, calls are usually open to attend, with the agenda shared on the public mailing list. Call details may be shared on the internal mailing lists accessible to only members for security purposes – so it may be best to ask the chair(s).
The major outcomes of the group’s are the DPV and associated vocabularies. The DPV is useful as a machine-readable representation of personal data processing and can be adopted in relevant use-cases such as legal compliance documentation and evaluation, policy specification, consent representation and requests, taxonomy of legal terms, and annotation of text and data. The DPV is an evolving vocabulary – as the DPVCG continues to work on updating it with broader concepts as well as enriching its hierarchy of concepts. For this, we invite contributions of concepts, use-cases, requirements, and applications.