A Pervasive Computing Ontology for User Privacy Protection in the Context Broker Architecture

Privacy protection is a key requirement for the future pervasive computing systems. This paper describes the design and implementation of a privacy protection framework that exploits the SOUPA policy ontology and its associated policy reasoning algorithm. The SOUPA policy ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language OWL allows users to define policy rules to permit or forbid actions that attempt to access the users' private information. Central to the policy reasoning algorithm is the use of a Description Logic inference engine that reasons over the OWL-DL constructs of the policy ontology. We also show the feasibility of this framework through a prototype of the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA).