Data Privacy Ontology for Ubiquitous Computing

Privacy is an ability to understand, choose, and regulate what personal data one shares, with whom, for how long and under what context. Data owners must not lose the rights of ownership, once the data is shared. Privacy decisions have many components that include identity, access granularity, time and context. We propose an ontology based model for data privacy configuration in terms of producer and consumer. Producer is an IP entity who owns data, that is Data owner. Consumer is an IP entity with whom data is shared. We differentiate between consumer and data holder, also and IP entity, which may not have similar access rights as consumer. As we rely on Semantic Web technologies to enable these privacy preferences, our proposed vocabulary is platform independent and can thus be used by any system relying on these technologies. Ideally, producers can specify a set of attributes which consumers must satisfy in order to be granted access to the requested information. Privacy can be configured not only in terms of typical read and edit, but novel attributes like location and time are also included in the proposed ontology. Keywords—Privacy Ontology; Data Privacy; Location based privacy; Time based privacy; Ubiquitous Computing