Roberto Y. García

Because of the importance of data-sharing for the economy, improved products and services, and to benefit society, the European Union has proposed developing a Common European Data Space (CEDS). The goal is to create a single European data market through 14 domain-specific data spaces (e.g., agriculture, or the Common European Agricultural Data Space (CEADS)). One of the central tenets of the CEDS is to ensure that those who share data can maintain control over who has access to, use of, and ability to share it (or ‘data sovereignty’). Data sovereignty is an umbrella concept with many different values comprising its implementation. Therefore, to successfully implement data sovereignty in the CEADS (and all CEDS for that matter), it is important to identify what values are important for stakeholders.This paper examines the CEADS to identify the most critical values for potential stakeholders of this data space. We implement a six-phase value-sensitive design methodology called ‘value mapping’ by interviewing stakeholders from an incipient Spanish data-sharing initiative (potentially representing over 1 million farmers) and conducting a workshop with 42 international stakeholders at an agri-tech summit. Our findings demonstrate the different values that are important for stakeholders of an agricultural data space: farmers (privacy, control, and trust); farm advisors (human welfare and autonomy); farmer associations (trust and human welfare); technology providers and intermediaries (autonomy and human welfare); public and regulatory bodies (autonomy); and society (justice). Furthermore, we describe different interdisciplinary steps to ensure and protect these values to ensure sovereignty-by-design in the CEADS.

In order to improve the management of copyright in the Internet, known as Digital Rights Management, there is the need for a shared language for copyright representation. Current approaches are based on purely syntactic solutions, i.e. a grammar that defines a rights expression language. These languages are difficult to put into practise due to the lack of explicit semantics that facilitate its implementation. Moreover, they are simple from the legal point of view because they are intended just to model the usage licenses granted by content providers to end-users. Thus, they ignore the copyright framework that lies behind and the whole value chain from creators to end-users. Our proposal is to use a semantic approach based on semantic web ontologies. We detail the development of a copyright ontology in order to put this approach into practice. It models the copyright core concepts for creation, rights and the basic kinds of actions that operate on content. Altogether, it allows building a copyright framework for the complete value chain. The set of actions operating on content are our smaller building blocks in order to cope with the complexity of copyright value chains and statements and, at the same time, guarantee a high level of interoperability and evolvability. The resulting copyright modelling framework is flexible and complete enough to model many copyright scenarios, not just those related to the economic exploitation of content. The ontology also includes moral rights, so it is possible to model this kind of situations as it is shown in the included example model for a withdrawal scenario. Finally, the ontology design and the selection of tools result in a straightforward implementation. Description Logic reasoners are used for license checking and retrieval. Rights are modelled as classes of actions, action patterns are modelled also as classes and the same is done for concrete actions. Then, to check if some right or license grants an action is reduced to check for class subsumption, which is a direct functionality of these reasoners.