Policy-based usage control for a trustworthy data sharing platform in smart cities

Abstract Although data is a key part in smart cities, traditionally there has been no systematic effort to enable the sharing of data in a trustworthy manner among applications or services. In order to promote sharing of data, mechanisms need to be put into place to provide the different actors — data producers, data consumers, etc. means to control and visualize how their data or requests are being processed and used. In this paper we deal with a key issue involved in trust which is usage control, i.e., how data is used once access to it has been granted. We propose a Data Usage Control Model ( DUPO ) to capture the diversity of obligations and constraints that data providers impose on the use of their data. Based on the DUPO model and semantic technologies, we propose a trustworthy data sharing platform which enhances transparency and traceability of data usage in smart cities. Lastly a proof-of-concept is developed to evaluate our solution and results show that the performance of the added trust does not impact negatively on the system.