The current European data strategy foresees a novel ecosystem of data sharing and data trading among public and private sector organizations in the EU member states. The focus is on enabling and fostering data sharing among the stakeholders while maintaining compliance with existing EU and national data protection legislation, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, managing data sharing in such a compliant manner requires additional metadata to be exchanged amongst the actors in this ecosystem. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel data model for managing data sharing activities. This model takes current and planned regulations (e.g., the Data Governance Act) and the resulting data ecosystem architectures (e.g. data intermediaries) into account and is applicable to different actions that are necessary for compliant data exchange, like data subject rights requests or intellectual property enforcement. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.