The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data

The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD, www.i-hd.eu) has been formed as one of the key sustainable entities arising from the Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research (IMI-JU-115189) and SemanticHealthNet (FP7-288408) projects, in collaboration with several other European projects and initiatives supported by the European Commission. i~HD is a European not-for-profit body, registered in Belgium through Royal Assent. i~HD has been established to tackle areas of challenge in the successful scaling up of innovations that critically rely on high-quality and interoperable health data. It will specifically address obstacles and opportunities to using health data by collating, developing, and promoting best practices in information governance and in semantic interoperability. It will help to sustain and propagate the results of health information and communication technology (ICT) research that enables better use of health data, assessing and optimizing their novel value wherever possible. i~HD has been formed after wide consultation and engagement of many stakeholders to develop methods, solutions, and services that can help to maximize the value obtained by all stakeholders from health data. It will support innovations in health maintenance, health care delivery, and knowledge discovery while ensuring compliance with all legal prerequisites, especially regarding the insurance of patient's privacy protection. It is bringing multiple stakeholder groups together so as to ensure that future solutions serve their collective needs and can be readily adopted affordably and at scale

On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus become a crucial issue in the design of modern computing systems. Among the different access control approaches proposed in the last decades, the policy-based one permits to capture, by resorting to the concept of attribute, all systems' security-relevant information and to be, at the same time, sufficiently flexible and expressive to represent the other approaches. In this paper, we move a step further to understand the effectiveness of policy-based specifications by studying how they permit to enforce traditional security properties. To support system designers in developing and maintaining policy-based specifications, we formalise also some relevant properties regarding the structure of policies. By means of a case study from the banking domain, we present real instances of such properties and outline an approach towards their automatised verification.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Provenance on the Web, Leaving the Walled Garden Behind ...

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Towards defining semantic foundations for purpose-based privacy policies

We define a semantic model for purpose, based on which purpose-based privacy policies can be meaningfully expressed and enforced in a business system. The model is based on the intuition that the purpose of an action is determined by its situation among other inter-related actions. Actions and their relationships can be modeled in the form of an action graph which is based on the business processes in a system. Accordingly, a modal logic and the corresponding model checking algorithm are developed for formal expression of purpose-based policies and verifying whether a particular system complies with them. It is also shown through various examples, how various typical purpose-based policies as well as some new policy types can be expressed and checked using our model

Trust on the Web: Some Web Science Research Challenges

Web Science is the interdisciplinary study of the World Wide Web as a first-order object in order to understand its relationship with the wider societies in which it is embedded, and in order to facilitate its future engineering as a beneficial object. In this paper, research issues and challenges relating to the vital topic of trust are reviewed, showing how the Web Science agenda requires trust to be addressed, and how addressing the challenges requires a range of disciplinary skills applied in an integrated manner

A Semantic Hierarchy for Erasure Policies

We consider the problem of logical data erasure, contrasting with physical erasure in the same way that end-to-end information flow control contrasts with access control. We present a semantic hierarchy for erasure policies, using a possibilistic knowledge-based semantics to define policy satisfaction such that there is an intuitively clear upper bound on what information an erasure policy permits to be retained. Our hierarchy allows a rich class of erasure policies to be expressed, taking account of the power of the attacker, how much information may be retained, and under what conditions it may be retained. While our main aim is to specify erasure policies, the semantic framework allows quite general information-flow policies to be formulated for a variety of semantic notions of secrecy.Comment: 18 pages, ICISS 201

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies