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Ruben Verborgh

Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny

Wout Slabbinck, Beatriz Esteves, Maarten de Mildt, Ruben Dedecker, Julián Rojas Meléndez, Sofie Verbrugge, Didier Colle, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh

Exchanging raw data points carries a significant cost and risk for both senders and recipients. Senders cannot reliably indicate what value they aim to achieve with the transaction, and how they want their data to be treated. Recipients cannot easily obtain and produce evidence about the data’s accuracy and their lawful right to process it for the intended purpose. While legal frameworks impose boundaries on acceptable behaviors, they prescribe no mechanisms or incentives for compliance, making raw data exchange—despite all of its drawbacks—the current path of least resistance. To encourage sustainable data-driven services, we establish key requirements for encapsulating raw data with a context that captures its purported history and intended destiny. In this paper, we introduce the resulting Trust Envelope model and specification, and showcase its expressiveness by addressing the identified requirements through two real-world use cases. We argue that our approach delivers mutual benefit to sender and recipient by facilitating more frequent granular exchanges, wherein each data transmission is encapsulated within a context unique to the specific processing. This reduces the cost and risk of exchanges, incentivizing them over raw data transactions. Trust Envelopes thereby introduces a local trust context to support the controlled exchange of sensitive data points, which previously would have relied on assumed or more explicit sender–recipient trust relationships. Our work can be extended with constraints across varying legal grounds from distinct jurisdictions, and to accompany purpose-specific derivation of data points.

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Published in 2025 in Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{slabbinck_wop_2025,
  author = {Slabbinck, Wout and Esteves, Beatriz and de Mildt, Maarten and Dedecker, Ruben and Mel\'{e}ndez, Juli\'{a}n Rojas and Verbrugge, Sofie and Colle, Didier and Colpaert, Pieter and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscript{th} Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns},
  year = 2025,
  month = nov,
  editor = {Novakazi, Fjoll\"{e} and Dalal, Aryan Singh},
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 4093,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  publisher = {CEUR},
  pages = {85--96},
  url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4093/paper6.pdf},
}

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ACM
Wout Slabbinck, Beatriz Esteves, Maarten de Mildt, Ruben Dedecker, Julián Rojas Meléndez, Sofie Verbrugge, Didier Colle, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh. 2025. Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny. In Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), CEUR, 85–96.
APA
Slabbinck, W., Esteves, B., de Mildt, M., Dedecker, R., Meléndez, J. R., Verbrugge, S., Colle, D., Colpaert, P., & Verborgh, R. (2025). Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny. In F. Novakazi & A. S. Dalal (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (Vol. 4093, pp. 85–96). CEUR.
IEEE
W. Slabbinck et al., “Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny,” in Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns, 2025, vol. 4093, pp. 85–96.
LNCS
Slabbinck, W., Esteves, B., de Mildt, M., Dedecker, R., Meléndez, J.R., Verbrugge, S., Colle, D., Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R.: Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny. In: Novakazi, F. and Dalal, A.S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16\textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns. pp. 85–96. CEUR (2025).
MLA
Slabbinck, Wout, et al. “Incentivizing Sustainable Data Exchanges through Unique Contextualization of History and Destiny.” Proceedings of the 16\Textsuperscriptth Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns, edited by Fjollë Novakazi and Aryan Singh Dalal, vol. 4093, CEUR, 2025, pp. 85–96.