An SOA-Based Architecture to Share Medical Data with Privacy Preservation

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in using Web services as a reliable means for medical data sharing inside and across healthcare organizations. In such service-based data sharing environments, Web service composition emerged as a viable approach to query data scattered across independent locations. Patient data privacy preservation is an important aspect that must be considered when composing medical Web services. In this paper, the authors show how data privacy can be preserved when composing and executing Web services. Privacy constraints are expressed in the form of RDF queries over a mediated ontology. Query rewriting algorithms are defined to process those queries while preserving users’ privacy.