Privacy Protection Mechanisms for Web Service Technology

The successful use of Web service technology in areas such as healthcare and government depends on its support to privacy preservation. As there is currently no privacy standard for Web services, several solutions have recently been proposed in the literature to deal with privacy in Web services. However, there is no solution that provides a suitable mechanism to describe privacy properties in Web services. When loosely-coupled components are involved, such as in Web service environments, a rich description of components is needed to determine whether they can interact in a manner that preserves privacy. The goal of this paper is to present privacy protection mechanisms for Web services, which use policies defined in the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) and an ontology defined in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in order to support Web service interactions with suitable privacy preservation levels.