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Small and medium-sized organisations face challenges in acquiring, storing and analysing personal data, particularly sensitive data (e.g., data of medical nature), due to data protection regulations, such as the GDPR in the EU, which stipulates high standards in data protection. Consequently, these organisations often refrain from collecting data centrally, which means losing the potential of data analytics and learning from aggregated user data. To enable organisations to leverage the full-potential of the collected personal data, two main technical challenges need to be addressed: (i) organisations must preserve the privacy of individual users and honour their consent, while (ii) being able to provide data and algorithmic governance, e.g., in the form of audit trails, to increase trust in the result and support reproducibility of the data analysis tasks performed on the collected data. Such an auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis is currently challenging to achieve, as existing methods and tools only offer partial solutions to this problem, e.g., data representation of audit trails and user consent, automatic checking of usage policies or data anonymisation. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no approach providing an integrated architecture for auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis. To address these gaps, as the main contribution of this paper, we propose the WellFort approach, a semantic-enabled architecture for auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis which provides secure storage for users’ sensitive data with explicit consent, and delivers a trusted, auditable analysis environment for executing data analytic processes in a privacy-preserving manner. Additional contributions include the adaptation of Semantic Web technologies as an integral part of the WellFort architecture, and the demonstration of the approach through a feasibility study with a prototype supporting use cases from the medical domain. Our evaluation shows that WellFort enables privacy preserving analysis of data, and collects sufficient information in an automated way to support its auditability at the same time.

In many countries worldwide, including Austria, the environmental impact of production facilities is strongly regulated leading to authorities issuing a large number of legal permits on this topic. The access of interested parties to these permits is typically supported by search systems that present a structured view of the permits along their key elements, such as issuing authority or their legal basis. In this paper, we present a real-life use case from Austria’s Environment Agency, where the extraction of such key elements represents a non-trivial task for laypersons with limited legal knowledge: the heterogeneity of data, complex language, and implicit information hinder the manual data extraction process and can lead to poor quality in data management. Based on an analysis of the use case’s main requirements, we propose an architecture for a system to support the extraction of key elements from legal permits by laypersons. The system combines methods and techniques based on Knowledge Graphs / Semantic Web and Machine Learning technologies and aims to be auditable in terms of its operation.

Multi-disciplinary data exchange still poses many challenges: Heterogeneous data sources, diverging data views, and lack of communication lead to defects, late resolving of errors, and mismatches over the project lifecycle. Semantic approaches such as ontologies are a viable solution to derive common concepts between disciplines to limit negative effects in their collaboration. However, the application of these semantic approaches is still quite limited due to its inherent complexity. The purpose of this paper, is to discuss the concept of local glossaries as a step towards a Common Concept Glossary (CCG) method: A tool-supported method to enable and simplify the creation of common concepts derived from local glossaries that are built by discipline-specific workgroups. The local concepts can aid by making changes visible and enabling traceability and maintainability of common models between different disciplines.

In the parallel engineering of large and long-running automation systems, such as Production Systems Engineering (PSE) projects, engineering teams with different backgrounds work in a so-called Round-Trip Engineering (RTE) process to iteratively enrich and refine their engineering artifacts, and need to exchange data efficiently to prevent the divergence of local engineering models. Unfortunately, the heterogeneity of local engineering artifacts and data, coming from several engineering disciplines, makes it hard to integrate the discipline-specific views on the data for efficient synchronization.