Semantics-Enabled Policies for Information Sharing and Protection in the Cloud

The cloud computing platform provides utility computing allowing people to have convenient and flexible information sharing services on the web. We investigate the inter-disciplinary area of information technology and law and use semantics-enabled policies for modeling legal regulations in the cloud. The semantics-enabled policies of information sharing and protection are represented as a combination of ontologies and rules to capture the concept of security and privacy laws. Ontologies are abstract knowledge representations of information sharing and protection which extracted manually from the data sharing and protection laws. Rules provide further enforcement power after ontologies have been constructed. The emerging challenges of legalizing semanticsenabled policies for laws in the cloud include mitigating the gap between semantics-enabled policy and laws to avoid any ambiguity in the policy representation, and resolving possible conflicts among policies when they are required to integrate the laws from multiple jurisdictions.