Invited Talk

Semantic Web vs. Privacy: Menace or opportunity?

The Semantic Web (SW) community should ask how SW techniques are threatening privacy, but also how they can help. Almost every method or technology that affects privacy can be applied as an attack tool as well as a protection tool. The first part of this talk shall illustrate this point. Unfortunately, it appears that technology alone cannot provide a full solution to online privacy - perhaps the hardest security problem that computer science has faced since its early days.

Then the second part of the talk will be devoted to some examples of how socio-economic models might address issues that seem to admit no technological solution. The big question now is how SW technology can support those approaches and improve their effectiveness.

Biography: Piero A. Bonatti is full professor of computer science at the University of Napoli Federico II, where he chairs the Computer Science curricula.

His research interests lie across Security and Privacy, and Knowledge representation and Reasoning. He contributed to the systematic development of controlled query evaluation theory, based on lies and/or refusals, addressing the inference problem in data and knowledge bases. He co-authored a policy composition language that had a perceivable influence on the design of XACML. Moreover, he coordinated the working group on policies of the European Network of Excellence REWERSE (FP6), that developed Protune (one of the most sophisticated trust negotiation systems), and a controlled natural language interface for semantic web policy authoring. His current interests include the application of socio-economic models to privacy and usage control.

In the past he contributed to the W3C RIF (Rule Interchange Format) standardization activity, and the W3C Policy Languages Interest Group (PLING).