Using contract and ontology for privacy protection in Service-Oriented Architecture

Privacy protection in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. As privacy protection can be considered as a contractual issue, the solution for the problem of privacy protection in SOA requires the use of electronic contracts. This is important, as the service consumer´s confidence of the protection of their privacy is a factor for the success of electronic services (e-services). This confidence may increase if the service consumer and provider can establish a contract, which states how the provider deals with information collected from the consumer. The service consumer can sign the contract if the privacy protection practices described in it meet what the consumer defines as appropriate practices. The goal of this paper is to use contract and ontology for privacy protection in SOA. Privacy contracts follow an approach based on feature modeling. In addition, they use a base ontology that provides a common privacy vocabulary.