S.L. 546.1 Art. 2Interpretation. 

In these regulations, unless the context otherwise requires:

"Act" means the Re-Use of Public Sector Information Act; AND RE-USE

"Administrative Register" means an official register which is designed to hold records of an administrative nature mainly dealing with the organisational structures of the public administration;

"application program interface" or "API" is a set of automated functions and protocols that enable machine-to-machine communications for the exchange and consumption of data in a dynamic environment. Such APIs shall follow a registration process prior to be authorised and included in the national data portal;

"controller" has the same meaning as in Article 4 of the General Data Protection Regulation;

"Council" or "the Council" or "the Data Governance Council" mean the Data Governance Council as established by Part XI;

"data discovery service" means the aggregation of metadata from various sources within the public administration into a single centralised repository to enable a comprehensive web-based search for official registers and datasets including also the pertinent legal basis and the data owner of each official register; it includes also the visualisation of the information provided from such searches;

"data owner" means the person or entity responsible for the processing, security, quality and access permissions of an official register; when identifiable information relating to a person is processed, the obligations of a data controller in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation shall apply;

"dataset" means an aggregation or filtering of selected data elements from one or more official registers into an identified and persistent list of records which can be used by other automated information services;

"Data Classification Scheme" means the Data Classification Scheme as established in Part VI;

"Data Governance Register" means an official register published on the national data portal which is intended to maintain records holding information relating to the technical and other details describing information assets and the automated systems used by the public administration;

"General Data Protection Regulation" means Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation); "information system" means a defined set of automated processes and user interfaces designed to collect, store and disseminate data for the purpose of providing useful information;

"national data portal" or "Malta Data Portal" or "national open data portal" means the web-based system and data repository which shall enable the management and publishing directly by the data owners of the data sharing permissions and the controlled lists and vocabularies as reference data, including also the functionality for the discovery of all official registers and the consumption of open data;

"official record" means an identifiable and distinct entry in an official register having the necessary qualities to be admissible as evidence in a court of law;

"official register" means a collection of official records mandated by Maltese legislation, which is included in the Register of Registers;

"open data" means and refers to a concept that is generally understood to denote data in an open format that can be freely used, re-used and shared by anyone for any purpose;

"open data policies" means policies which encourage the wide availability and re-use of public sector information for private or commercial purposes, with minimal or no legal, technical or financial constraints;

"personal data" has the same meaning as in Article 4 of the General Data Protection Regulation;

"public employee" shall have the same meaning as that provided in article 2(1) of the Public Administration Act;

"public sector body" shall have the same meaning as assigned to it by article 2 of the Act;

"reference data" means the lists of controlled vocabularies and descriptions which are managed by the data owner of the specific official register in order to provide additional meaning and classification information to the records held in such registers;

"Register of Registers" shall mean the Register of Registers established by Part V;

"uniform resource identifier" or "URI" is a web-compliant format for the allocation of a machine-readable persistent identifier for every entry in an official register, including the different identifiers assigned to the different versions of each record; and

"user" mean public employees and, or data subjects having AND RE-USE

access to an official register.

Part II - Sharing of Data between Public Sector Bodies