Semantic knowledge and privacy in the physical web

Abstract

In the past few years, the Internet of Things has started to become a reality; however, its growth has been hampered by privacy and security concerns. One promising approach is to use Semantic Web technologies to mitigate privacy concerns in an informed, flexible way. We present CARLTON, a framework for managing data privacy for entities in a Physical Web deployment using Semantic Web technologies. CARLTON uses context-sensitive privacy policies to protect privacy of organizational and personnel data. We provide use case scenarios where natural language queries for data are handled by the system, and show how privacy policies may be used to manage data privacy in such scenarios, based on an ontology of concepts that can be used as rule antecedents in customizable privacy policies.