Standardized Data Governance for Environmental IoT A Normative Protocol for Cross-Border Industrial Chemical Surveillance

A plume crosses a frontier in hours; the authority competent to act on it is bounded by that frontier; and the data that would substantiate action are governed by the jurisdiction in which they were produced. This article treats that mismatch as a governable design problem rather than an intractable political one, and proposes a normative protocol for cross-border industrial chemical surveillance.

Its governing principle is that interoperability obligations must attach to the datum rather than to the platform or the jurisdiction of its holder: what travels across a border must be an observation carrying its own legal and technical envelope origin jurisdiction, lawful basis of collection, permitted uses, retention terms, uncertainty, and provenance so that evidentiary force survives the crossing. From this principle we derive six norms forming a governance envelope, a mutual recognition mechanism based on conformance rather than on institutional trust, and a correspondence layer that makes heterogeneous national vocabularies comparable without requiring them to converge.