Skip to main content

Context Obfuscation for Privacy via Ontological Descriptions

  • Conference paper
Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3479))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Context information is used by pervasive networking and context-aware programs to adapt intelligently to different environments and user tasks. As the context information is potentially sensitive, it is often necessary to provide privacy protection mechanisms for users. These mechanisms are intended to prevent breaches of user privacy through unauthorised context disclosure. To be effective, such mechanisms should not only support user specified context disclosure rules, but also the disclosure of context at different granularities. In this paper we describe a new obfuscation mechanism that can adjust the granularity of different types of context information to meet disclosure requirements stated by the owner of the context information. These requirements are specified using a preference model we developed previously and have since extended to provide granularity control. The obfuscation process is supported by our novel use of ontological descriptions that capture the granularity relationship between instances of an object type.

The work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Co-operative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) through the Australian Federal Government’s CRC Programme (Department of Education, Science, and Training).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Agrawal, R., Kiernan, J., Srikant, R., Xu, Y.: An XPath-based preference language for P3P. In: Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 629–639. ACM Press, New York (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Chen, H., Finin, T., Joshi, A.: A Pervasive Computing Ontology for User Privacy Protection in the Context Broker Architecture. Technical Report TR-CS-04-08, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA, University of Maryland (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cranor, L., Langheinrich, M., Marchiori, M.: A P3P preference exchange language 1.0 (APPEL1.0) (April 2002), http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P-preferences (last accessed 4/11/2004)

  4. Cranor, L., Langheinrich, M., Marchiori, M., Presler-Marshall, M., Reagle, J.: The Platform for Privacy Preferences 1.0 (P3P1.0) Specification (2001), http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/ (last accessed 4/11/2004)

  5. Gandon, F.L., Sadeh, N.M.: A Semantic e-Wallet to Reconcile Privacy and Context Awareness. In: Fensel, D., Sycara, K., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) ISWC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2870, pp. 385–401. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Halpin, T.A.: Information Modeling and Relational Databases: From Conceptual Analysis to Logical Design. Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Henricksen, K., Indulska, J.: A software engineering framework for context-aware pervasive computing. In: 2nd IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2004, Orlando (March 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Henricksen, K., Indulska, J., Rakatonirainy, A.: Generating Context Management Infrastructure from Context Models. In: Mobile Data Management 2003, MDM 2003 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Henricksen, K., Wishart, R., McFadden, T., Indulska, J.: Extending context models for privacy in pervasive computing environments. In: Proceedings of CoMoRea 2005 (2005) (to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hong, J.I., Landay, J.A.: An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, pp. 177–189. ACM Press, New York (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Johnson, C., Carmichael, D., Kay, J., Kummerfeld, B., Hexel, R.: Context Evidence and Location Authority: the disciplined management of sensor data into context models. In: Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Context Modelling, Reasoning and Management at UbiComp 2004, September 2004, pp. 74–79 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lederer, S., Beckmann, C., Dey, A., Mankoff, J.: Managing Personal Information Disclosure in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. Technical Report IRB-TR-03-015, Intel Research Berkley (2003)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Wishart, R., Henricksen, K., Indulska, J. (2005). Context Obfuscation for Privacy via Ontological Descriptions. In: Strang, T., Linnhoff-Popien, C. (eds) Location- and Context-Awareness. LoCA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3479. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11426646_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11426646_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25896-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32042-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics