In the News

The Web´s inherent openness and potential for growth and new applications make it a powerful tool, especially as methods develop for handling data on the semantic Web. In the semantic Web, heterogeneous data sources can be treated as a single source, with an ontology that mediates between them, thereby allowing the creation of knowledge out of information. But formidable problems accompany its potential to publish and store massive amounts of information. As more users access and reason over the information on the Web, particularly in pursuit of creating more valuable knowledge, issues arise of securing and protecting personal information and of this information´s accuracy and provenance. Computer scientists are addressing these problems, imagining and developing solutions that range from semantic firewalls to methods for monitoring and auditing the use of information