Enabling Data Sharing in Contextual Environments

Abstract

Internet of Things environments enable us to capture more and more data about the physical environment we live in and about ourselves. The data enable us to optimise resources, personalise services and offer unprecedented insights into our lives. However, to achieve these insights data need to be shared (and sometimes sold) between organisations imposing rights and obligations upon the sharing parties and in accordance with multiple layers of sometimes conflicting legislation at international, national and organisational levels. In this work, we show how such rules can be captured in a formal representation called "Data Sharing Agreements". We introduce the use of abductive reasoning and argumentation based techniques to work with context dependent rules, detect inconsistencies between them, and resolve the inconsistencies by assigning priorities to the rules. We show how through the use of argumentation based techniques use-cases taken from real life application are handled flexibly addressing trade-offs between confidentiality, privacy, availability and safety.

Mission Support for Drones

“…Conflicts can arise for many reasons, such as different sources for policy, contention for resources, and delayed propagation of updates. We refer interested readers to work on argumentation-based techniques for dynamic policy prioritisation [11], [12], and [13] as an example of a current approach. Although this paper has focused on drones, the ITA is researching the generative policy model in a wide variety of other systems ranging from land vehicles to a future generation of smart firewalls.…”

Access Control and Quality Attributes of Open Data: Applications and Techniques

“…Given the heterogeneous nature of the agreements, various conflicts can be generated, especially between legal and business rules, or legal rules and user requirements. The authors in previous studies [17,20] propose a policy language that represents complex agreements, and an analysis process for capturing the conflicts and solving them. The approach is based on abductive [16] and argumentation based reasoning [4,8], as this technique can facilitate decision making mechanisms under conflicting knowledge.…”

“…To represent the various data sharing agreements that incorporate extensive types of information, we use a policy analysis language [17]. The used policy language is an extension of the one introduced by Craven et al [7], where the used extension supports efficiently the data access of open data and the data quality properties.…”

“…The two above rules are in conflict between each other. To capture the above conflicts and conflicts similar to the ones shown previously, we introduce an analysis process to the DSAs [17], based on the abductive reasoning, that identifies conflictual policy regulation rules. The analysis is able to identify gaps between rules as well as redundancies.…”

GORGIAS: Applying argumentation

“…Recently, we have used Gorgias for addressing another problem of conflict resolution, specifically for resolving diplomatic disputes between countries [51]. In another work [26], Gorgias was used in a context where disputes can arise in a shared environment by many stakeholders, where several legal and other contracts may apply.…”