Governance

Data Governance

Definition

The policies, processes, and standards that manage data availability, usability, integrity, and security throughout its lifecycle. Strong data governance is a prerequisite for trustworthy AI—the EU AI Act explicitly requires data governance practices for training, validation, and testing datasets.

Related Terms

Data Lineage

The ability to track data's origin, movement, transformations, and consumption throughout a system. Data lineage is essential for AI auditability, debugging model behaviour, and demonstrating GDPR and EU AI Act compliance to regulators.

Data Minimisation

The GDPR principle requiring that only the minimum necessary personal data be collected and processed for a specified purpose. Applied to AI, data minimisation drives techniques like federated learning, synthetic data generation, and differential privacy to train effective models without retaining raw personal data.

GDPR + AI

The intersection of the General Data Protection Regulation with AI systems. Key tensions include the right to explanation for automated decisions (Article 22), data minimisation requirements that limit training data use, and purpose limitation that constrains repurposing of collected data for model training.

Related Services

Eu Ai Act Compliance

Knowing the Terms Is Step One. Applying Them Is Step Two.

Book a 30-minute call to discuss how these AI concepts translate to your specific industry and business challenges.