Research on Semantic Privacy Policy for Web Service

Privacy protection is an important issue to be solved in web service. Existing policy-based schemes usually use syntactic approaches to represent and match the privacy policies, which may restrict the policy specification and intersection because of lacking semantics. In this paper, a novel mechanism of privacy policy based on semantics for web service is proposed. Through constructing a general privacy ontology, the formal definition and matching algorithm for the semantic privacy policies are presented. The policy matching is implemented actually through the subsumption reasoning of semantic concepts, which can effectively improve the accuracy of matching result. In addition, the trust levels are modeled as concepts in the ontology and taken as the precondition for policy matching, thus avoiding the matched policies are violated by the dishonest entities. Experimental results have verified the validity and feasibility of the proposed mechanism.