In recent years, Web users have seen an exponential growth in the amount of data being generated and exchanged in form of blogs, tweets, social networking applications etc., to name just a few. One of the popular features in these systems is the feature to link one stream of data to another, enabling the dissemination of data to a large audience within a short time span. While users feel empowered to reach thousands in a short time frame, it however leaves very little room for misjudgement and error; such systems provide users little or no prior visibility on the privacy implications of their actions. In this respect, Semantic technologies have emerged as a potential candidate for building privacy enhancing solutions for the online Web users.
In another parallel development, the recent linked-data initiative from government, academia and industry is already generating interest among the software development community. Social networking services such as Facebook allow their users to download a copy of their archive; similarly, Google practising its data liberation principle, has made provision for its search engine users to download a copy of the individuals search history. In the UK, millions of anonymised patients medical records will be released for research and innovation under the governments new data initiative and by making such large datasets available to the public, the government is anticipating it will lead to the development of new path-breaking medical solutions thus driving down medical costs. Similarly, supermarkets and banks are expected to join in to provide shopping history and bank transaction data to their customers. It is therefore claimed that with appropriate software tools, the customers will be empowered to analyse their data in ways which will inform them about their spending habits, food wastage etc. In this respect Semantic Technologies are seen as the natural choice to semantically link such heterogeneous datasets at design time to assist innovative user-centric applications in deriving new knowledge at run-time, thus enriching the software systems capability and usefulness. While the current initiatives are rapidly moving towards making the users data available for distributed sharing and linking, without sufficient privacy safeguards and controls, there is a high risk these initiatives will become a privacy nightmare for the Web users. Although, Semantic Web area has been redefined in recent years, privacy enhancing technologies which specifically relate to the use of URI, RDF and SPARQL are still in their early stages. The wider software engineering community has, in the last few years, put Semantic Web technologies to innovative use to support privacy in various application environments; especially exploiting the use of privacy Ontologies and OWL based privacy policies to perform contextual reasoning to inform and enforce access control mechanisms. Addressing privacy challenges in the software engineering domain will entail eliciting user-centric requirements and modelling, knowledge discovery and representation, privacy policy modelling, privacy-by-design architectures and evaluation of privacy enhancing techniques and methods. This workshop aims at providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange and disseminate their work to a wider audience and receive critical feedback on work primarily supporting privacy in and with semantic technologies.
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The workshop aims to be a highly enriching and interactive forum for researchers exploring the emergence of privacy threats and issues surrounding the use of Semantic Web Technologies and the development and evaluation of privacy enhancing technologies which make use of Semantic Web technologies to support online privacy of Web users.
We welcome high-quality papers about recent advancements in (a) how privacy is being supported in the Web of Data, especially through semantic technologies and (b) how Semantic Web principles are being applied in the context of privacy protection of Web users or end-users of software systems in general. We seek application-oriented, as well as more theoretical papers and position papers in the following, non-exhaustive list of to