PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites

Website owners make conscious and unconscious decisions that affect their users, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks in the process. In this paper we introduce PrivacyScore, an automated website scanning portal that allows anyone to benchmark security and privacy features of multiple websites. In contrast to existing projects, the checks implemented in PrivacyScore cover a wider range of potential privacy and security issues. Furthermore, users can control the ranking and analysis methodology. Therefore, PrivacyScore can also be used by data protection authorities to perform regularly scheduled compliance checks. In the long term we hope that the transparency resulting from the published benchmarks creates an incentive for website owners to improve their sites. The public availability of a first version of PrivacyScore was announced at the ENISA Annual Privacy Forum in June 2017.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. A german version of this paper discussing the legal aspects of this system is available at arXiv:1705.0888

Information retrieval in the Web: beyond current search engines

AbstractIn this paper we briefly explore the challenges to expand information retrieval (IR) on the Web, in particular other types of data, Web mining and issues related to crawling. We also mention the main relations of IR and soft computing and how these techniques address these challenges

The SADC Groundwater Data and Information Archive, Knowledge Sharing and Co-operation Project. Final report

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Groundwater Data and Information Archive, Knowledge Sharing and Co-operation Project, funded by the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and Department for International Development, UK (DFID), was initiated in September 2009 to identify, catalogue and subsequently promote access to the large collection of reports held in the UK by the British Geological Survey (BGS). The work has focused on a wealth of unpublished so-called “grey” data and information which describes groundwater occurrence and development in Southern Africa and was gathered by the BGS over its many decades of involvement in the region. The project has four main aims: To catalogue and describe the "grey data" documents on SADC groundwater held by the BGS within a digital metadatabase. To identify a sub-set of scanned documents to be made freely available to groundwater practitioners and managers in the SADC region by electronic distribution. To link the metadatabase and digital sub-set of documents via a web portal hosted by the BGS, to enable download of documents by SADC groundwater workers. To strengthen links between BGS hydrogeologists with counterparts in SADC, and provide an example of groundwater data sharing which could be emulated by other European Geological Surveys with substantial data holdings on SADC groundwater. The project has successfully met these aims. The assessment of BGS archived material produced an electronic meta-database describing 1735 items held in hard copy. Of these, 1041 have been scanned digitally to searchable Portable Document Format (PDF) format. A subset of 655 PDFs including partial documents related to groundwater development from the colonial and post independence period as well as BGS internal project reports and reports approved for web dissemination by host countries are now available to download (free of charge) at http://www.SADCgroundwaterarchive.com . Initial results indicate a good deal of interest both from within SADC and elsewhere, accessed by directly addressing the website and via a search engine such as Google. The information presented has already been used by in-region projects such as the SADC Hydrogeological Mapping project and the Malawi Water Assessment Project. This is essentially a pilot project providing an example of how Web delivery of the archive is an important step forward for the well-being of the SADC region. It permits access to documents few even new existed and will, it is hoped, provide a valuable dataset that should inhibit the temptation to waste scarce resources by ‘re-inventing the wheel’

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges