ColPri: Towards a Collaborative Privacy Knowledge Management Ontology for the Internet of Things

Abstract

User privacy preferences management is a nontrivial task. In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), where a huge amount of data is generated, transferred and stored via various local and cloud architectures, privacy protection becomes complex and hard to manage. Indeed, privacy management is a time-consuming activity that requires a lot of knowledge which most of IoT system users often lack or are not keen on acquiring due to its complexity. The knowledge dimension has often been neglected, by both researchers and industry. In this article, we focus on the privacy protection knowledge management aspect. We produce a first version of ColPri, an ontology that sets the basis for a collaborative extensible privacy protection knowledge management system that is able to collaboratively produce diagnosis of IoT stakeholders privacy policies. This paper aims to investigate collaborative privacy knowledge management in the IoT and how non-technical users could benefit from it to easily configure their privacy policies. It allows an open exchange of privacy-related knowledge. We propose ColPri, a collaborative privacy ontology after specifying design requirements that guided our choices during the ontology creation process. This ontology lays out the use of a privacy community to create and develop privacy-related information within a user-centric privacy architecture. Then, we show how to use this ontology through a use case scenario. Finally, we describe future research based on this work.