PROACT: An Ontology-Based Model of Privacy Policies in Ambient Intelligence Environments

Future computing environments involve integrating everyday objects equipped with tiny processors, sensors and wireless network cards. These smart objects (artifacts) may explore their environment and communicate with each other. Interactivity with humans may provide the ability of dealing with tasks in an intuitive way. In order to model the way everyday activities are carried out within such an environment, we introduce the notion of “activity sphere”. Activity spheres are/include such smart artifacts in order to provide functionality of various applications. The privacy of the users is considered as a major issue due to the invisibility of all computations which leads to the users being unaware of them. This paper describes how the privacy of the resources within each activity sphere owned by a user can be protected, by applying a privacy policy ontology, called PROACT.