A Lifecycle for Data Sharing Agreements: How it Works Out

An electronic Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) is a human-readable, yet machine-processable contract, regulating how organizations and/or individuals share data. In past work, we have 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 a traditional legal contract into the electronic DSA. However, the definition of an electronic DSA is only the starting point of a complex DSA lifecycle, driving the contract from its creation to (1) an analysis phase, where the DSA rules are checked against conflicts; and (2) a mapping phase, where the analysed rules are transposed into privacy policies expressed in enforceable languages. This paper presents our vision for the architectural definition of a DSA system, where a lifecycle manager orchestrates: an authoring tool for legal experts, policy experts, and end users; an analyser for checking consistency of the DSA rules; a mapper for encoding rules in a low level language amenable for enforcement.