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.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

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

Open Data Institute, 'What is a Data Trust?' (theodi.org).
Hardinges J., 'Defining a Data Trust', ODI working paper, 2018.

Also known as

Civic data trust

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data trust"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-trust" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-trust",
  "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.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-trust",
  "sameAs": [
    "Civic data trust"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:20",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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