A ‘data access and authorisation plan’ determines who has access to what data and under what conditions, to ensure privacy. Unauthorised access and security breaches should be monitored and appropriate actions should be taken to prevent any recurrence of breaches.

The DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on W3C's Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe.