Title:
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Ontology based privacy compliance for health data disclosure in Europe
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The harmonization of data protection law in Europe has been theoretically achieved by means
of the EU directive on data protection. In practice, the harmonization is not absolute and
conflicts continue to exist in the ways Member States are implementing the directive. The
integration of different European medical systems will continue to be challenging if
technology does not intervene to enhance interoperability between national regulatory
frameworks on data protection. In fact, the gap between high level regulations and
organisational processes of privacy management in both intellectual and operational terms,
dramatically scale within a multi-jurisdictional environment. When sharing medical data
between different health organisations in Europe, it is important that the different parties
involved in the sharing handle the data in the way indicated by the legislation of the Member
State where the data was originally collected, as the requirements might differ from one State
to another. Privacy requirements, such as patient consent, may be subject to conflicting
conditions between different national frameworks as well as between different legal and
ethical frameworks of even a single Member State. This is due first to the fact that, subject to
the provision of suitable safeguards, the directive leaves some space for Member States to lay
down simplifications and exemptions to some of the obligations that are dictated; such as the
obligation to notify the data subject of the processing of their data. Consequently, the legal
frameworks in some Member States tend to be less favourable to the processing of personal
data for medical research than others. The problem, researchers must then face, is how to
comply with multi jurisdiction requirements when working across national borders.
In this thesis, we present an approach to enhance privacy compliance when sharing patient
data across European domains and ensure its enforcement internally and within external
domains where the data might travel. This approach is based on the semantic modelling of
privacy obligations that are of legal, ethical or cultural nature. These requirements are for the
sharing of personal data between different European Member States. Our model reflects both
similarities and conflicts, if any, between the different Member States. The semantic model is
thereafter used to tackle three crucial compliance management issues that are: first,
increasing privacy awareness within the medical users' community; second, explicitly
integrating legal requirements of privacy within access control policies adopted by existing
distributed infrastructures such as the grid; third, the modelling of privacy requirements will
be also used to allow the auditing of compliance of privacy aware access control policies and
the high level privacy guidelines our system initially offer to medical users. In conclusion this
research contributes to bridging the gap between high level privacy regulations and
organisational processes of privacy management; both human and operational processes.
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