W3C Privacy Workshop Report Available

Hello all,

the report from the October 2006 W3C Privacy Workshop is now
available, along with a press release:

  http://www.w3.org/2006/07/privacy-ws/report
  http://www.w3.org/2006/12/privacy-workshop-pressrelease

Thanks to the chairs and presenters, and all of you who attended and
contributed, for making this happen!

The workshop report summarizes the following possible areas for
follow-up activities:

  One key issue for near-time follow-up was the area of policy
  interoperability and mapping: While there seemed to be no
  interest among participants in creating a new,
  all-encompassing access control and obligation language,
  there was significant interest in exploring the interfaces
  between different, possibly domain-specific policy
  languages. Ontologies and common modeling principles could
  help combine these languages and also help enable automatic
  translation between different languages. Important
  contributions in this area could include a standardized
  language to describe evidence; mechanisms for the discovery
  of ontologies. More than a third of the participants in the
  workshop indicated interest in launching a W3C Interest
  Group to further explore this space.
  
  Other relevant questions in this context concerned unifying
  frameworks for access control, data handling, and usage
  control languages; this area of work could help levereage
  languages developed in the DRM space for privacy protection,
  and could help to clarify the applicability of
  access-control languages such as XACML in the privacy space.
  There was also discussion of developing and expressing
  pre-defined sets of user preferences, in order to improve
  the usability of policy-based technologies.
  
  Among the topics identified as necessitating further
  research, economic aspects of privacy (including business
  cases, and privacy SLAs) drew most interest; John J Borking
  and Sören Preibusch were particularly interested in this
  direction of discussion. Preibusch (on behalf of Deutsches
  Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung) offered to possibly host
  a W3C-cosponsored workshop on this space.

We anticipate to present a draft charter for an Interest Group in
the area of policy language interoperability and frameworks early
next year.  If you are interested in this follow-up activity, we
would very much welcome your input and feedback about what the scope
of such an Interest Group should look like.  Feel free to send
feedback either to this list, or privately to Rigo Wenning
<rigo@w3.org> and myself.

Happy holidays, and kind regards,
-- 
Thomas Roessler, W3C  <tlr@w3.org>

Received on Friday, 15 December 2006 08:03:47 UTC