Enforcing Privacy on the Semantic Web

Over the past few years there has been a huge influx of web accessible information. Information access and storage methods have grown considerably. Previously unknown or hard-to-get information is now readily available to us. The World Wide Web has played an important role in this information revolution. Often, sensitive information is exchanged among users, Web services, and software agents. This exchange of information has highlighted the problem of privacy. A large number of strategies employed to preserve people’s privacy require users to define their respective privacy requirements and make decisions about the disclosure of their information. Personal judgments are usually made based on the sensitivity of the information and the reputation of the party to which the information is to be disclosed. In the absence of a comprehensive privacy preserving mechanism, no guarantees about information disclosure can be made. The emerging Semantic Web is expected to make the challenge more acute in the sense that it would provide a whole infrastructure for the automation of information processing on the Web. On the privacy front, this means that privacy invasion would net more quality and sensitive personal information. In this chapter, we describe a reputation-based approach to automate privacy enforcement in a Semantic Web environment. We propose a reputation management system that monitors Web services and collects, evaluates, updates, and disseminates information related to their reputation for the purpose of privacy protection.