Abstracting Anonymization Techniques: A Prerequisite for Selecting a Generalization Algorithm

Abstract The recent buzz around open data highlighted the crucial problem of anonymization in the context of data publishing. Many research efforts were devoted to the definition of techniques performing such an anonymization. However the selection of the most relevant technique and the adequate algorithm is complex. Successful decision depends firstly on the ability of data publishers to understand the anonymization techniques and their associated algorithms. In this paper, we focus on the choice of an algorithm among the different ones implementing one of the anonymization techniques, namely generalization. Through an abstraction process presented in this paper, we provide data publishers with simplified descriptions for the generalization technique and its algorithms. These descriptions facilitate the understanding of the algorithms by data publishers having low programing skills. We present also some other use cases of these abstractions as well as an experimentation conducted to validate them.