Web technologies and privacy policies for the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid aims at making the current electricity grid more efficient, featuring an IT-layer that includes communication flows between a multitude of stakeholders. Its infrastructure is likely to be integrated with other IT-based systems. We argue that in order to enable the integration between already existing large-scale information networks (e.g., the Internet or the Web) and newly developed IT infrastructures such as Smart Cities, means for machine-understandable representation of data are required. Since these “smart” systems will exchange large volumes of highly sensitive data (billing and personal data), users should have the ability to specify their intent on how their data can be shared. Thus, systems require built-in mechanisms for protecting data. In this paper, we outline a Smart Grid architecture based on Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies, and present mechanisms to allow for automated access control and enforcement of privacy rights on a technical level.