Privacy Agents and Ontology for the Semantic Web

Conducting international e-business requires knowledge about the privacy and consumer protection laws, and regulations that affect transacting parties. To support this requirement, we describe a high-level organization for a Web-privacy ontology composed of a hierarchical organization of formal laws and acts, informal cultural guidelines and standards for business in general, and specific legislation and guidelines for interest groups. A prototype of a Web privacy ontology is built for the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The ontology is built upon XML infrastructure. We propose that existing and to-be-designed XML-based P3P tags be incorporated in any regulatory privacy ontology to enable future P3P agents to automatically match not only the business’ privacy policy with the user preference rules, but also to match the business privacy policy with the privacy laws (for a start), and later with commerce and othertype laws, applicable to the stated legal jurisdiction(s) in which the business operates.

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