A framework for privacy in social communities

Web-based social communities are one of the most widely used applications nowadays. Recently, privacy concerns within these communities have increased significantly. This paper proposes a framework which addresses these challenges by introducing a distributed social community mechanism and relation-based content access management by exploiting semantic web technologies. In this regard, a community framework along with fine-grained access mechanisms are formalised using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Instead of an explicit definition, some additional facts of the mechanisms are inferred by executing access authorisation policies through semantic web rules. These implicit facts answer the queries of the information requesters and can optionally be passed back to the formalised knowledge base to check for the validity and consistency. This paper also presents the components of the functional architecture of the framework. Copyright © 2009, Inderscience Publishers.