User Data Privacy in Web Services Context Using Semantic Desktop - SemanticLIFE Case Study

Abstract

The growing number of Web Services technologies and their use have revolutionized the web. Web Services will play an important role in the next web generation (i.e. Semantic Web) together with Semantic Web technologies. As a matter of fact, Web Services and Semantic Web are two building blocks to provide machine process-able services. One of the biggest challenges in both Web Services and Semantic Web is privacy issues. Privacy means which part of information should be hidden and which should be visible. In the web services context, no matter if it is a simple or a complex service, the requester and provider of the service has to disclose information for handshaking, so privacy issues will always exist . In the utilization of web services, there exist exchange and storage of information, so the protection of personal information is very important. To acquire any service, one has to disclose personal information (e.g. home address, DoB, mobile number, credit card information etc.) so as to fulfill the requirement and utilize the service properly. But the problem arises when the submitted information is shared with a third party. In collaborative environment, where different people are interacting with each other and also the information is being shared among different people, the sharing of information without exposing unrelated information becomes a difficult task. The problem statement and its solution explained in this paper are focused in the domain of health information systems, but they can be used in a collaborative enterprise environment. In this paper we have introduced ontology-based user data privacy in the web services domain using the semantic desktop´s (SemanticLIFE) SOPA framework.