An ontology driven privacy framework for collaborative working environments

Abstract

The ability to collaborate has always been vitally important to organisations. With the availability of current networking and computing power, the creation of collaborative working environments CWEs has allowed for this process to occur anytime over any geographical distance. While the strength of a CWE is its ability to allow for the exchange of information freely between collaborators, this opens the users up to a possible loss of privacy. In this work, the issue of protecting privacy while collaborating is discussed. To address the privacy concerns that are raised, a privacy framework is presented. This framework contains a generic privacy ontology that allows the framework to adapt to any domain, a reasoning engine that infers who has access to what information according to which privacy rules, and a collaborative privacy manager CPM which can make decisions and assist collaborating users with their privacy protection. The main objective of this work is to present the generic ontology of privacy and to highlight tasks the CPM performs within a CWE. This work has been deployed through a prototype tool that demonstrates a scenario between a hospital and a university.