OPPO: An Ontology for Describing Fine-Grained Data Practices in Privacy Policies of Online Social Networks

Privacy policies outline the data practices of Online Social Networks (OSN) to comply with privacy regulations such as the EU-GDPR and CCPA. Several ontologies for modeling privacy regulations, policies, and compliance have emerged in recent years. However, they are limited in various ways: (1) they specifically model what is required of privacy policies according to one specific privacy regulation such as GDPR; (2) they provide taxonomies of concepts but are not sufficiently axiomatized to afford automated reasoning with them; and (3) they do not model data practices of privacy policies in sufficient detail to allow assessing the transparency of policies. This paper presents an OWL Ontology for Privacy Policies of OSNs, OPPO, that aims to fill these gaps by formalizing detailed data practices from OSNS' privacy policies. OPPO is grounded in BFO, IAO, OMRSE, and OBI, and its design is guided by the use case of representing and reasoning over the content of OSNs' privacy policies and evaluating policies' transparency in greater detail.Comment: 14 Pages, 6 figures, Ontology Showcase and Demonstrations Track, 9th Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2023), co-located with FOIS 2023, 19-20 July, 2023, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canad

Frequent Use Cases Extraction from Legal Texts in the Data Protection Domain

Because of the recent entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a growing of documents issued by the European Union institutions and authorities often mention and discuss various use cases to be handled to comply with GDPR principles. This contribution addresses the problem of extracting recurrent use cases from legal documents belonging to the data protection domain by exploiting existing Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs). An analysis of ODPs that could be looked for inside data protection related documents is provided. Moreover, a first insight on how Natural Language Processing techniques could be exploited to identify recurrent ODPs from legal texts is presented. Thus, the proposed approach aims to identify standard use cases in the data protection field at EU level to promote the reuse of existing formalisations of knowledge

Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web

This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO

Integration of Legacy Appliances into Home Energy Management Systems

The progressive installation of renewable energy sources requires the coordination of energy consuming devices. At consumer level, this coordination can be done by a home energy management system (HEMS). Interoperability issues need to be solved among smart appliances as well as between smart and non-smart, i.e., legacy devices. We expect current standardization efforts to soon provide technologies to design smart appliances in order to cope with the current interoperability issues. Nevertheless, common electrical devices affect energy consumption significantly and therefore deserve consideration within energy management applications. This paper discusses the integration of smart and legacy devices into a generic system architecture and, subsequently, elaborates the requirements and components which are necessary to realize such an architecture including an application of load detection for the identification of running loads and their integration into existing HEM systems. We assess the feasibility of such an approach with a case study based on a measurement campaign on real households. We show how the information of detected appliances can be extracted in order to create device profiles allowing for their integration and management within a HEMS

Data protection regulation ontology for compliance

The GDPR is the current data protection regulation in Europe. A significant market demand has been created ever since GDPR came into force. This is mostly due to the fact that it can go outside of European borders if the data processed belongs to European citizens. The number of companies who require some type of regulation or standard compliance is ever-increasing and the need for cyber security and privacy specialists has never been greater. Moreover, the GDPR has inspired a series of similar regulations all over the world. This further increases the market demand and makes the work of companies who work internationally more complicated and difficult to scale. The purpose of this thesis is to help consultancy companies to automate their work by using semantic structures known as ontologies. By doing this, they can increase productivity and reduce costs. Ontologies can store data and their semantics (meaning) in a machine-readable format. In this thesis, an ontology has been designed which is meant to help consultants generate checklists (or runbooks) which they are required to deliver to their clients. The ontology is designed to handle concepts such as security measures, company information, company architecture, data sensitivity, privacy mechanisms, distinction between technical and organisational measures, and even conditionality. The ontology was evaluated using a litmus test. In the context of this ontology, the litmus test was composed of a collection of competency questions. Competency questions were collected based on the use-cases of the ontology. These questions were later translated to SPARQL queries which were run against a test ontology. The ontology has successfully passed the given litmus test. Thus, it can be concluded that the implemented functionality matches the proposed design