Organisation
Workshop Organisers
- Beatriz Esteves
Ghent University - imec, Belgium | contact: beatriz.esteves@ugent.be - Harshvardhan J. Pandit
AI Accountability Lab (AIAL), ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland | contact: me@harshp.com - Ruhi Anand Finn
ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland | contact: ruhi.anandfinn@adaptcentre.ie
Programme Committee
TBA
Call for papers
It's 2026 and we still can't visit any website without clicking "Yes" on a cookie banner, exchanging access to our most private data for the right to browse around. Managing and enforcing our privacy preferences in a personalised manner is also quite challenging. Meanwhile there is a wave of AI training based on personal data that is unaddressed and yet to be regulated. Additionally, AI and data protection laws are emerging exponentially, following in the footsteps of the GDPR and now the AI Act. In each of these laws, one key theme emerges: the need for smarter, better, efficient, and enforceable data governance - but how to achieve these?
In this context, the NeXt-generation Data Governance 2026 workshop aims to bring together technical, legal and societal researchers, and industry experts to discuss data governance, the emergence of data spaces identity wallets and the impact of the European strategy for data in such systems. The workshop aims to support the development of solutions to manage data, policies and provenance in a trustful and interoperable manner and to aid in the management and reporting of legal documentation falling from the EU's GDPR for data protection and the DGA, Data Act, AI Act and EHDS to create legally-aligned, AI-powered data ecosystems, using semantic-based specifications such as ODRL, DPV or Solid.
As such, this workshop will have presentations and discussions of interest to both data providers and consumers, researchers, standardisation bodies, businesses, and citizens who want to interoperate in the Data Spaces era.
Broadly, we welcome submissions on any of the following topics: semantics and interoperability, AI & data governance, regulations, data protection, privacy, policy management and enforcement. A non-exhaustive list of suggested topics is below:
- Role of the Semantic Web in the European strategy for data
- FAIR management and interoperability of data spaces
- Management of data altruism / intermediation services activities
- Legal and governance aspects of data spaces
- Legal and governance aspects of IoT data management
- Legal and governance aspects of AI models and AI-generated data
- Impact of the Digital Omnibus Regulation Proposal
- AI governance
- Policies for access and usage control
- Policy management and enforcement in data spaces
- Going beyond consent for personal data processing
- Data spaces and secondary reuse of data
- Reasoning over data and data policies
- Negotiation of access to data through Web agents
- Personalisation of data management interfaces
- Usability of data management interfaces
- Digital identity and data wallets
- User-centric perspectives on privacy and data protection
- Decentralisation and personal data spaces
- Personal knowledge graphs
- Standards for personal data management
- Standards for AI-based systems
- Auditing methods/tools for data spaces
Submission Instructions
Submissions must use the official CEUR-Workshop style format with one-column format. CEUR also provides templates in a zip-file and in an Overleaf project.
The workshop will accept two types of contributions:
- Full papers must be at least 8 and at most 16 pages of main content, with additional pages for references.
- Short/demo papers must be at least 5 and at most 7 pages of main content, with additional pages for references.
Papers that do not meet the size and formatting requirements will not be reviewed. All papers must be in PDF format and submitted through OpenReview.
The review process is open. Papers do not need to be anonymised prior to submission for review.
Workshop proceedings will be published in a CEUR-Workshop Proceedings Volume.
Key dates
- submission deadline: June 25, 2026 (11:59 pm, AoE)
- notification by: July 30, 2026 (11:59 pm, AoE)
- camera-ready by: TBA
Previous Editions of NXDG
- NXDG 2025 took place on 03-SEP-2025 and was co-located with the 21st SEMANTiCS conference.
- NXDG 2024 took place on 17-SEP-2024 and was co-located with the 20th SEMANTiCS conference.
📰 Updates/News 📰
Funding Acknowledgements: The AI Accountability LAb (AIAL) is supported by grants from following groups: the AI Collaborative, an Initiative of the Omidyar Group; the Bestseller Foundation; and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The ADAPT SFI Centre for Digital Media Technology is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the SFI Research Centres Programme and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through Grant#13/RC/2106_P2.