Government and law

The right to have personal information removed from search results or erased by those who hold it, established for search engines by the EU Court of Justice in 2014 and as the right to erasure in Article 17 of the GDPR.

1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on how the Internet is regulated, arguing that software architecture ('code') constrains behaviour much as law, markets and norms do.

Principles written by thirty open-government advocates meeting in Sebastopol, California, on 7–8 December 2007: government data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and licence-free.

2008 Communications of the ACM article by Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler and Sussman arguing that the Web should make the use of information accountable to rules, rather than rely on hiding and access control alone.

2009 book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger arguing that digital memory has made forgetting the exception, and proposing expiration dates for stored information.

Guardian article of June 2013 by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, based on documents from Edward Snowden, revealing the PRISM programme.

Judgment of the EU Court of Justice of 13 May 2014 (C-131/12) holding that search engines must, on request, remove links to information about a person that is inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.

Observer and Guardian article of March 2018 by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison reporting that a political consultancy obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users through a quiz app; Facebook then restricted what apps could read.

Report of the W3C workshop held in London in July 2026, which reached consensus on a new W3C Working Group for ODRL 3.0: policies that are machine-actionable across sectors, with stronger formal semantics, conformance rules and a test suite, working with standards for identity, provenance, legal information and data spaces.

Format for business and financial reports whose taxonomies define each reporting concept and its relations, begun by Charles Hoffman in 1998; regulators, securities commissions and tax agencies worldwide receive filings in it, and Inline XBRL embeds the tags in an ordinary HTML report.

W3C Recommendation of 16 April 2002 for websites to state, in machine-readable form, what they do with visitors' data, so browsers could compare it with users' preferences. Few sites or browsers implemented it, and the W3C made it obsolete in 2018.

XML standard for legislative, judicial and executive documents, begun in 2004 by the UN for African parliaments and adopted by OASIS as LegalDocML in August 2018; its identifiers follow the FRBR model of work, expression and manifestation.

Identifier for court decisions across the EU, in the form ECLI:country:court:year:number, with a minimum set of shared metadata; set out in EU Council conclusions published in April 2011.

Identifiers and an ontology for national and EU legislation, so each law and version has a stable web address and machine-readable metadata; the EU Council invited its adoption in October 2012.

20-character identifier for every company, fund or government body that takes part in financial transactions, defined in ISO 17442. The G20 called for it in 2011 after the 2008 crisis showed that regulators could not tell who was exposed to whom; the first LEIs were issued in December 2012. Its records say who is who and who owns whom, and are published openly, including as RDF.

W3C vocabulary for describing datasets in data catalogues, used by government open-data portals; a Recommendation since January 2014.

Vocabulary for describing how personal and other data is processed, why and on what legal basis, made by a W3C community group from 2018; version 1 was published in December 2022. It is designed to support legal requirements such as the GDPR.

The EU's multilingual thesaurus of the subjects of its work, maintained by the Publications Office since 1984 in the 24 official languages and more.

EU directive of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, which created a separate 'sui generis' right for database makers alongside copyright; it is why open data licences such as ODbL and CC0 also deal with database rights.

EU directive of 2003 setting minimum rules for re-using public sector information, which made re-use of government data a legal matter across the EU; revised in 2013 and recast in 2019 as the Open Data Directive.

US National Security Agency programme, begun in 2007, that collected internet communications from major US companies including Google, Facebook and Apple; disclosed in June 2013 from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

EU directive of 14 March 2007 requiring member states to publish their environmental spatial data in common, interoperable forms, building a shared European spatial data infrastructure.

United States government open data portal, launched in May 2009 by federal CIO Vivek Kundra to publish machine-readable datasets from federal agencies.

UK government open data portal, built under Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt and publicly launched in January 2010.

The UK's official online statute book, run by The National Archives and launched in 2010, which publishes every law as a web page and as data, with each page's data a URI suffix away, and exposes the statute book as linked data.

EU regulation on personal data, adopted on 14 April 2016 and applied from 25 May 2018, which gives people rights over data about them and binds anyone processing it; it set off machine-readable work on consent and data-processing records.

MIT computer scientist in artificial intelligence and programming languages since 1964; co-author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

British computer scientist who led the building of data.gov.uk with Tim Berners-Lee and co-founded the Open Data Institute with him.

Yale computer scientist working on cryptography, privacy and computer science and law; co-author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

American legal scholar who co-founded Creative Commons in 2001 and has written on how law and code regulate the Internet.

American computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who studies usable privacy and security; she co-authored P3P while at AT&T Labs and later served as the US Federal Trade Commission's chief technologist.

British investigative journalist who reported the Cambridge Analytica story for the Observer and Guardian.

Director of MIT's Internet Policy Research Initiative, whose research is on systems that make the Web answerable to legal and policy rules; lead author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

British journalist at the Guardian, co-author of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica report.

Scottish journalist who co-reported the Snowden documents for the Guardian in 2013.

University of Bologna computer scientist who, with Monica Palmirani, created most of Akoma Ntoso's core vocabulary.

American journalist who reported the Snowden documents, including PRISM, for the Guardian in 2013.

MIT computer scientist, co-author of 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs', who co-founded Creative Commons and co-wrote ccREL.

Researcher at Trinity College Dublin's AI Accountability Lab, previously at the ADAPT Centre, who chairs the W3C community group behind the Data Privacy Vocabulary and edits it.

Head of e-services and strategy at the UK National Archives who led legislation.gov.uk with the aim of exposing the statute book as data as well as documents.

Researcher, then at the W3C and MIT, who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

Computer scientist, then at ETH Zurich, who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

IBM engineer who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

Italian computer scientist who edited the W3C's P3P specification while at the W3C, MIT and the University of Venice.

University of Bologna professor of legal informatics who, with Fabio Vitali, created most of Akoma Ntoso's core vocabulary.

Austrian legal scholar at Oxford who argued in 'Delete' (2009) for the virtue of forgetting.