Authors:
Assadarat Khurat
1
and
Boontawee Suntisrivaraporn
2
Affiliations:
1
Hamburg University of Technology, Germany
;
2
Thammasat University, Thailand
Keyword(s):
P3P policy, Ontology, Semantic web.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Collaboration and e-Services
;
Data Engineering
;
Domain Analysis and Modeling
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Representation
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Ontology Engineering
;
Semantic Web
;
Soft Computing
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Privacy has become a crucial issue in the online services realm. P3P policy is a privacy policy enabling websites to express their privacy practices. With this policy, online users can check against their privacy preferences which facilitates the users to decide whether or not the service should be used. However, the interpretation of a P3P policy is unwieldy due to the lack of a precise semantics of its descriptions and constraints. For instance, it is admissible to have purpose and recipient values that have inconsistent meaning. Thus, there is a need for an explicit formal semantics for P3P policy to mitigate this problem. In this paper, we propose to use an OWL ontology to systematically and precisely describe the structures and constraints inherent in the P3P specification. Additional constraints are also defined and incorporated into the ontology in such a way that the reasons of an invalid P3P policy can be disclosed after the verification done by an OWL reasoner.