A Web Service Privacy Framework Based on a Policy Approach Enhanced with Ontologies

The Web service technology facilitates the automated use of electronic services on the Web. It offers benefits, mainly the system interoperability support, but it also raises privacy concerns on the handling of sensitive data about service consumers. For instance, in electronic commerce applications, privacy protection is frequently a major consumer requirement. It includes concerns such as, how sensitive data are used and who has access to them. These concerns have been increasingly discussed. However, there is not a standard privacy framework for Web services. This paper proposes a Web service privacy framework based on a policy approach enhanced with ontologies. It uses different Web standards for supporting privacy protection, including the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).