ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks

Kisia, Marlin; Kurteva, Gabriela; Verborgh, Ruben; Esteves, Beatriz

ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks

Marlin Kisia, Gabriela Kurteva, Ruben Verborgh, and Beatriz Esteves

The EU’s DGA establishes two structurally distinct channels for voluntary data sharing: a civic pathway via a DAO for general-interest objectives, and a commercial channel via a DISP for economic exchange. Both channels impose permissions, prohibitions and duties, currently governed by prose. The DGA’s promise of trustworthy data sharing depends on compliance decisions at machine speed. Although machine-readable vocabularies for some of these obligations exist, it remains a work in progress because of ever-evolving legislation. In this context, we modelled both channels as ODRL policy chains, using the DPV’s DGA extension to represent actors and obligations, and the Trust Envelope model to capture the intended usage of each exchange. This paper presents a complete lifecycle: from a discoverable shared data pool, through a donation or commercial listing offer, to a concrete usage agreement, and finally to an access request for each channel. The same data point produces structurally different policy chains – the destiny component of a Trust Envelope – depending on the sharing channel: purpose-bound under altruism, commercially scoped under intermediation. Machine-readable policy chains make trustworthy data sharing actionable by reducing legal and technical barriers. The patterns we establish are structurally transferable to successor and analogous frameworks, including the Data Act, as the EU’s digital legislation landscape consolidates.

BibTeX other citation formats

To be published in 2026 in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference.

Keywords:

trust
ODRL

Read this article online

Request a digital copy of this article.

Cite this article in your work

Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{kisia_opal_2026,
  author = {Kisia, Marlin and Kurteva, Gabriela and Verborgh, Ruben and Esteves, Beatriz},
  title = {{ODRL} Policy Chains for the {DGA's} Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks},
  booktitle = {Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23rd Extended Semantic Web Conference},
  year = 2026,
  month = may,
}

Alternatively, pick a reference of your choice below:

ACM: Marlin Kisia, Gabriela Kurteva, Ruben Verborgh, and Beatriz Esteves. 2026. ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks. In Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference. Accepted for publication.
APA: Kisia, M., Kurteva, G., Verborgh, R., & Esteves, B. (2026, May). ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks. Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference. Accepted for publication.
IEEE: M. Kisia, G. Kurteva, R. Verborgh, and B. Esteves, “ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks,” in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference, 2026. Accepted for publication.
LNCS: Kisia, M., Kurteva, G., Verborgh, R., Esteves, B.: ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks. In: Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference (2026). Accepted for publication.
MLA: Kisia, Marlin, et al. “ODRL Policy Chains for the DGA’s Altruism and Intermediation Frameworks.” Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 23^rd Extended Semantic Web Conference, 2026. Accepted for publication.