Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) -- Version 2
Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Beatriz Esteves, Georg P. Krog, Paul Ryan, Delaram Golpayegani, Julian Flake
TL;DR
The paper presents Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) as a machine-readable, standards-based framework for describing personal data processing, highlighting its evolution from DPV 1.0 (GDPR-focused) to DPV 2.0 (broader scope including AI, DGA, and cross-jurisdictional regulations). It details requirements for legal vocabularies (information modelling, legal/semantic extensibility, stakeholder interoperability), and explains DPV's dual SKOS/RDFS and OWL2 semantics, versioned IRIs, and reorganized extensions to support diverse use cases. The authors demonstrate DPV's adoption in academia, industry, and standards bodies, and discuss methodologies (community governance, ontology engineering, and best practices) that underpin its development and maintenance. They also outline future directions, including further TEC and AI extension work, regulatory coverage, and guidance materials to facilitate broader, compliant deployment across jurisdictions and sectors.
Abstract
The Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV), developed by the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group (DPVCG), enables the creation of machine-readable, interoperable, and standards-based representations for describing the processing of personal data. The group has also published extensions to the DPV to describe specific applications to support legislative requirements such as the EU's GDPR. The DPV fills a crucial niche in the state of the art by providing a vocabulary that can be embedded and used alongside other existing standards such as W3C ODRL, and which can be customised and extended for adapting to specifics of use-cases or domains. This article describes the version 2 iteration of the DPV in terms of its contents, methodology, current adoptions and uses, and future potential. It also describes the relevance and role of DPV in acting as a common vocabulary to support various regulatory (e.g. EU's DGA and AI Act) and community initiatives (e.g. Solid) emerging across the globe.