The first NeXt-generation Data Governance (NXDG) workshop was designed to unite experts from technical, legal, and societal research, as well as industry experts, to explore key issues surrounding data governance, the emergence of data spaces, and the implications of the European data strategy on these. It encouraged submissions on a range of topics, including semantics and interoperability, AI and data governance, data protection, privacy, and policy management and enforcement. The workshop received 8 paper submissions, of which 1 was rejected based on reviews, 5 were accepted for presentation and publication, and 2 were conditionally accepted (and later on accepted after the authors revised the publications and included the suggestions of the reviewers). Each submitted paper was reviewed by two members of an international program committee (full list below), with a relevant background in the technical, legal and/or societal domains promoted by this workshop and aligned with the submission. The workshop reviewing was open/non-blind - both the authors and reviewers had their identity visible, and the OpenReview platform was utilised for this purpose. The reviews of all the submitted papers are openly available at https://openreview.net/group?id= SEMANTiCS.cc/2024/Workshop/NXDG. The following papers were presented at the workshop: 1. Initiating interdisciplinary research for future-proof data protection in the context of Data Spaces and semantic interoperable data sharing by Michiel Fierens which addresses challenges currently facing data protection law in the context of a widespread implementation of Data Spaces and semantic interoperable data sharing; 2. Towards Cultivating Decentralised Data Privacy, Interoperability and Trust with Semantic PETs and Visualisations by Anelia Kurteva and John Domingue which proposes development of a human-centered approach for building trusted self-sovereign decentralised spaces for personal data governance based on combining semantics with privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) and the utilisation of graphical visualisations; 3. Towards time privacy policies in ODRL by Juan Cano-Benito, Andrea Cimmino, Raúl García-Castro which addresses current challenges regarding the use of ODRL by extending the ODRL ontology and aligning it to other well-known ontologies to support time or temporal policies; 4. Mapping Data Governance Requirements Between the European Union's AI Act and ISO/IEC 5259: A Semantic Analysis by Kuruvilla George Aiyankovil, Dave Lewis, Julio Hernandez which uses semantic web vocabularies to map AI Act Article 10 regarding data governance to the relevant provisions of the ISO SC42 standard 5259 on 'Data Quality for Machine Learning';
The workshop was conducted as alongside other workshops and events within the SEMANTiCS conference. The workshop program consisted of a keynote delivered by Professor Dave Lewis (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) “AI Act, Interoperability and the Semantic Web” which enriched the workshop given the timeliness of the topic and its inspirational dissemination of knowledge.
Given the relevance of the topic, the evolving landscape of regulations and policies related to data governance within the EU and international forums, and the enthusiasm of the attendees within the workshop, we intend to continue iterations of this workshop in the future.
We thank the following people for being part of the Program Committee and for supporting this work with their time and expertise in reviewing the submissions.
PC Members