Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
3.8 Privacy and Trust for the Semantic Web
Privacy is about protecting information about individuals. Furthermore, an
individual can specify say to a web service provider the information that can
be released about him or her. Privacy has been discussed a great deal in the
past especially when it relates to protecting medical information about pa-
tients. Social scientists as well as technologists have been working on privacy
issues. However, privacy has received enormous attention during the past year.
This is mainly because of the advent of the web, the semantic web, counter-
terrorism and national security. For example, in order to extract information
about various individuals and perhaps prevent and/or detect potential terror-
ist attacks data mining tools are being examined. We have heard much about
national security vs. privacy in the media. This is mainly due to the fact that
people are now realizing that to handle terrorism, the government may need
to collect data about individuals and mine the data to extract information.
Data may be in relational databases or it may be text, video and images.
This is causing a major concern with various civil liberties unions (see [25]).
Closely related to privacy is anonymity. Some argue that it is important to
maintain anonymity.
Recently there has been much work on trust and the semantic web (see
the research by Finin et al. [26, 27]). The challenges include how do you
trust the information on the web? How do you trust the sources? How do
you negotiate between different parties and develop contracts? How do you
incorporate constructs for trust management and negotiation into XML and
RDF? What are the semantics for trust management?
Researchers are working on protocols for trust management. Languages
for specifying trust management constructs are also being developed. Also
there is research on the foundations of trust management. For example, if A
trusts B and B trusts C, then can A trust C? How do you share the data
and information on the semantic web and still maintain autonomy? How do
you propagate trust? For example, if A trusts B at say 50% of the time and
B trusts C 30% of the time, then what value do you assign for A trusting
C? How do you incorporate trust into semantic interoperability? What are
the quality of service primitives for trust and negotiation? That is, for certain
situations one may need 100% trust while for certain other situations 50%
trust may suce (see also [28]).
Another topic that is being investigated is trust propagation and propa-
gating privileges. For example, if you grant privileges to A, what privileges
can A transfer to B? How can you compose privileges? Is there an algebra
and calculus for the composition of privileges? Much research still needs to be
done here. One of the layers of the semantic web is Logic, Proof and Trust.
Essentially this layer deals with trust management and negotiation between
different agents and examining the foundations and developing logics for trust
management.
