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Ruben Verborgh

Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges

Beatriz Esteves, Ruben Dedecker, Wout Slabbinck, Filip Pattyn, and Ruben and Verborgh

The emerging digitalisation of healthcare services, and in particular of the related health data they use or generate, can play a pivotal role in advancing public health initiatives, healthcare delivery, and health-related research and development. However, this digitalisation presents interoperability and data integration challenges due to the fragmentation of data sources and complexity of the involved data. Furthermore, the evolving European landscape on data protection requirements, and in particular the newly-enforceable European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation, also raise additional regulatory compliance requirements that must be fulfilled in order to support the primary and secondary use of health data. In this context, an assessment of legal and technical requirements that need to be tackled in order to have trustful exchanges of health data was performed. The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) specifications emerge as promising candidates to specify such requirements as machine-readable policies, that can be acted upon by policy engines to provide access to sensitive health data. To this end, in this article, we introduce (i) an analysis of legal requirements for health data exchange, (ii) existing semantic specifications to model them as machine-readable policies, and (iii) an agreement instantiation specification and implementation. The developed health data exchange policy specification highlights the usefulness of the ODRL and the DPV specifications for modelling these requirements, while the agreement instantiation specification promotes an interoperable algorithm that can be used to generate common terms for health data exchange. Additional work is also necessary to support all requirements coming from the EHDS, as well as a benchmark that can be used to evaluate the compliance of algorithms with the agreement instantiation specification.

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Published in 2025 in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{esteves_opal_2025,
  author = {Esteves, Beatriz and Dedecker, Ruben and Slabbinck, Wout and Pattyn, Filip and and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges},
  booktitle = {Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference},
  editor = {Sabou, Marta and Harth, Andreas and Lisena, Pasquale and Curry, Edward and Zhang, Bohui and Alharbi, Reham and He, Yuan and Rehm, Georg and Schimmler, Sonja and Dietze, Stefan and Manola, Natalia and Cimmino, Andrea and Fornara, Nicoletta and Rodríguez-Doncel, Víctor and Domingue, John and Rettinger, Achim and Trilling, Damian and Grobelnik, Marko and d'Amato, Claudia and Fionda, Valeria and Tiddi, Ilaria and Tolomei, Gabriele},
  year = 2025,
  month = jun,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 3977,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3977/OPAL2025-9.pdf},
}

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ACM
Beatriz Esteves, Ruben Dedecker, Wout Slabbinck, Filip Pattyn, and Ruben and Verborgh. 2025. Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges. In Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (CEUR Workshop Proceedings).
APA
Esteves, B., Dedecker, R., Slabbinck, W., Pattyn, F., & and Verborgh, R. (2025). Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges. In M. Sabou, A. Harth, P. Lisena, E. Curry, B. Zhang, R. Alharbi, Y. He, G. Rehm, S. Schimmler, S. Dietze, N. Manola, A. Cimmino, N. Fornara, V. Rodríguez-Doncel, J. Domingue, A. Rettinger, D. Trilling, M. Grobelnik, C. d’Amato, … G. Tolomei (Eds.), Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (Vol. 3977).
IEEE
B. Esteves, R. Dedecker, W. Slabbinck, F. Pattyn, and R. and Verborgh, “Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges,” in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference, 2025, vol. 3977.
LNCS
Esteves, B., Dedecker, R., Slabbinck, W., Pattyn, F., and Verborgh, R.: Semantic Framework for Legally-aligned Health Data Exchanges. In: Sabou, M., Harth, A., Lisena, P., Curry, E., Zhang, B., Alharbi, R., He, Y., Rehm, G., Schimmler, S., Dietze, S., Manola, N., Cimmino, A., Fornara, N., Rodríguez-Doncel, V., Domingue, J., Rettinger, A., Trilling, D., Grobelnik, M., d’Amato, C., Fionda, V., Tiddi, I., and Tolomei, G. (eds.) Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (2025).
MLA
Esteves, Beatriz, et al. “Semantic Framework for Legally-Aligned Health Data Exchanges.” Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference, edited by Marta Sabou et al., vol. 3977, 2025.

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