Legal and Technical Perspectives in Data Sharing Agreements Definition

An electronic Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) is a human-readable, yet machine-processable contract, regulating how organizations and/or individuals share data. In this paper, we shed light on DSA engineering, i.e., the process of studying how data sharing is ruled in traditional legal human-readable contracts and mapping their fields (and rules) into formats that are machine-processable, leading to the transposition of the traditional contract into the electronic DSA. Tangible creation of the electronic DSA is possible through the design and implementation of a three-step DSA definition phase, with an associated authoring tool. The tool is specifically tailored for encoding not only the terms of law but also the rules that an organization may have put in place (e.g., corporate internal policies, or privacy policies, or data processing agreements) to manage the data, as well as end users’ privacy preferences.