Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A patient-data trust governing reuse of de-identified NHS records for approved research projects.
- Is an instance
A municipal data trust governing access to citizen-contributed IoT data.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A standalone open data portal is not a data trust unless a fiduciary governance structure is added.
- Not an instance
An internal corporate data lake is not a data trust.
Editorial commentary
Data trust is a governance pattern rather than a specific technical platform. The Open Data Institute (UK) and the Ada Lovelace Institute have developed the modern conception: a trust entity (often a charitable foundation or community-interest company) takes on legal duties towards data subjects and contributors, enabling controlled sharing for defined purposes. Data trusts have been piloted for urban data, biomedical data, and AI-training corpora. The model is distinct from a ‘data commons’ (open pooled resources) and from a ‘data hub’ (technical aggregation).
References
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Also known as
Civic data trust
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Data trust"
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"name": "Data trust",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-trust",
"description": "A legal and organisational structure in which a fiduciary intermediary holds, governs, and brokers access to a body of data on behalf of its contributors and beneficiaries, applying agreed terms of access, use, and accountability.",
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"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-trust",
"sameAs": [
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],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
