On the application of ontology to privacy protection

As an effective tool for unified representation of concepts, ontology has been applied to developing mechanisms for privacy protection to deal with problems caused by the heterogeneity of data. Although there are a lot of researches in the privacy related ontologies, but they have not been categorized and organized, making the current ontology related privacy protection research no clear line. We first propose a classification method to classifying the ontology used for privacy protection into three categories which are privacy ontology, personal ontology and social network ontology. We then classify the applications of ontology based privacy protection into five types and conduct a comparison analysis on the respective ontologies for the five types of applications. At last, we explicitly analyze the ontologies in terms of their relationships to privacy protection and point out some shortcomings in the current research as well as some future research directions.