Towards a base ontology for privacy protection in service-oriented architecture

The service consumer´s confidence in the protection of their privacy is an important factor for the success of electronic services (e-services). It may increase if the service provider offers a description of its data practices. This description can be compared to what the consumer defines as appropriate practices. To allow the exchange of privacy-related descriptions and automatically compare them, the parties involved in the interaction should be able to use a common vocabulary. The goal of this paper is to present a base privacy ontology for e-services and a privacy framework for service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ontology offers a base vocabulary that can be extended to create ontologies specific to a given service domain and operating environment. The framework uses ontologies so that it can support service selection considering the consumer´s privacy requirements. It extends SOA with provider policies and consumer preferences based on privacy ontologies.