An ontology for privacy policy management in ubiquitous environments

Abstract

The SOHand (Service Oriented Handover) architecture supports ubiquitous systems handovers, allowing the user to take control of the session and to migrate, transparently, between wireless technologies and providers (access and content ones). To ensure that the handovers will be done with no problems while users are using services, such architecture uses a set of ontologies called DOHand (Domain Ontology for Handovers). The ontologies will help the negotiation process between the different agents involved. Additionally, as users migrate in their daily duties and activities, they will eventually want to communicate with each other, in an ad-hoc way, to exchange information or to share device/network resources, such as memory, processing, email and bandwidth, in opportunistic ways in a strategy named PSN (Pocket Switched Network). Be it in an infra-structured or ad-hoc way, during the interactions the users need to have a good notion of risk and trust to their partners. They need to define privacy policies that must be negotiated between the parts during the inter-providers handovers; and they need to assess the potential of danger during an opportunistic exchange. In this paper, we describe PrOHand (Privacy Ontology for Handovers), which is an extension of DOHand privacy concept. PrOHand supports privacy policies management, handling information and services used by the SOHand users during infrastructured and PSN interactions. A case study is described in which PrOHand is instantiated for the haggle architecture.