A Provenance-Based Compliance Framework

Given the significant amount of personal information available on the Web, verifying its correct use emerges as an important issue. When personal information is published, it should be later used under a set of usage policies. If these policies are not followed, sensitive data could be exposed and used against its owner. Under these circumstances, processing transparency is desirable since it allows users to decide whether information is used appropriately. It has been argued that data provenance can be used as the mechanism to underpin such a transparency. Thereby, if provenance of data is available, processing becomes transparent since the provenance of data can be analysed against usage policies to decide whether processing was performed in compliance with such policies. The aim of this paper is to present a Provenance-based Compliance Framework that uses provenance to verify the compliance of processing to predefined information usage policies. It consists of a provenance-based view of past processing of information, a representation of processing policies and a comparison stage in which the past processing is analysed against the processing policies. This paper also presents an implementation using a very common on-line activity: on-line shopping .