SeCoMan: A Semantic-Aware Policy Framework for Developing Privacy-Preserving and Context-Aware Smart Applications

Abstract

This paper is intended to provide a solution for developing context-aware smart applications preserving the users' privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT). In this sense, we present a framework called Semantic Web-based Context Management (SeCoMan) aimed at offering a set of predefined queries to provide applications with information about indoor location of users and objects, as well as context-aware services. SeCoMan uses a semantic-oriented IoT vision where semantic technologies play a key role. In fact, SeCoMan uses Semantic Web for modeling description of things, reasoning over data to infer new knowledge, and defining context-aware policies. SeCoMan also defines a layered architecture, including functions related to the management of the users' privacy in a manner that accommodate IoT requirements, in addition to not affecting system performance nor introducing excessive overheads. A thorough discussion on other related works, together with some experiments to measure the throughput and scalability, confirm that SeCoMan is a solution that improves the most relevant proposals existing so far.