Cesare Bartolini

Using Ontologies to Model Data Protection Requirements in Workflows

Data protection, currently under the limelight at the European level, is undergoing a long and complex reform that is finally approaching its completion. Consequently, there is an urgent need to customize semantic standards towards the prospective legal framework. The aim of this paper is to provide a bottom-up ontology describing the constituents of data protection domain and its relationships. Our contribution envisions a methodology to highlight the (new) duties of data controllers and foster the transition of IT-based systems, services, tools and businesses to comply with the new General Data Protection Regulation. This structure may serve as the foundation for the design of data protection compliant information systems.

Cloud Providers Viability: How to Address it from an IT and Legal Perspective?

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving towards a cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprises and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, proposing some ways of mitigating the problem both from a technical and from a legal perspective.

Cloud providers viability

A major part of the commercial Internet is moving toward the cloud paradigm. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on the organizational structures of enterprizes and introduces new challenges that must be properly addressed to avoid major setbacks. One such challenge is that of cloud provider viability, that is, the reasonable certainty that the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will not go out of business, either by filing for bankruptcy or by simply shutting down operations, thus leaving its customers stranded without an infrastructure and, depending on the type of cloud service used, even without their applications or data. This article attempts to address the issue of cloud provider viability, defining a possible way of modeling viability as a non-functional requirement and proposing some approaches that can be used to mitigate the problem, both from a technical and from a legal perspective. By introducing a structured perspective into the topic of cloud viability, describing the risks, factors and possible mitigators, the contribution of this work is twofold: it gives the customer a better understanding to determine when it can rely on the cloud infrastructure on the long term and what precautions it should take in any case, and provides the CSP with means to address some of the viability issues and thus increase its customers’ trust.

Metrics for Transparency

Transparency is a novel non-functional requirement for software systems. It is acclaimed to improve the quality of service since it gives users access to information concerning the system’s processes, clarifying who is responsible if something goes wrong. Thus, it is believed to support people’s right to a secure and private processing of their personal data. We define eight quality metrics for transparency and we demonstrate the usage and the effectiveness of the metrics by assessing transparency on the Microsoft HealthVault, an on-line platform for users to collect, store, and share medical records.

Mutating OWLs: semantic mutation testing for ontologies

Ontologies are an essential component of semantic knowledge bases and applications, and nowadays they are used in a plethora of domains. Despite the maturity of ontology languages, support tools and engineering techniques, the testing and validation of ontologies is a field which still lacks consolidated approaches and tools. This paper attempts at partly bridging that gap, taking a first step towards the extension of mutation testing techniques to ontologies expressed in a widely-used format. Mutation testing techniques, revisited in the light of the peculiar features of the ontology language and structure, can help in the engineering and refinement of ontologies and software

PrOnto: Privacy Ontology for Legal Reasoning.

The GDPR (GDPR, REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)) introduces the self-assessment of digital risks and the modulation of duties on the basis of the impact assessment analysis, including specific measures that intend to safeguard the data subject’s human dignity and fundamental rights. Semantic web technologies and legal reasoning tools can support privacy-by-default and legal compliance. In this light, this paper presents a first draft of a legal ontology on the GDPR, called PrOnto, that has the goal of providing a legal knowledge modelling of the privacy agents, data types, types of processing operations, rights and obligations. The methodology used here is based on legal theory analysis joined with ontological patterns.

Modelling Metrics for Transparency in Medical Systems

Transparency, a principle advocated by the General Data Protection Regulation, is usually defined in terms of properties such as availability, auditability and accountability and for this reason it is not straightforwardly measurable. In requirement engineering, measuring a quality is usually implemented by defining a set of metrics for its composing properties, but conventional approaches offer little help to achieve this task for transparency. We therefore review requirements for availability, auditability and accountability and, with the help of a meta-model used to describe non-functional properties, we discuss and advance a set of metrics for them. What emerges from this study is a better justified and comprehensive tool which we apply to measure the level of transparency in medical data-sharing systems.

Software Testing Techniques Revisited for OWL Ontologies

Ontologies are an essential component of semantic knowledge bases and applications, and nowadays they are used in a plethora of domains. Despite the maturity of ontology languages, support tools and engineering techniques, the testing and validation of ontologies is a field which still lacks consolidated approaches and tools. This paper attempts at partly bridging that gap, taking a first step towards the extension of some traditional software testing techniques to ontologies expressed in a widely-used format. Mutation testing and coverage testing, revisited in the light of the peculiar features of the ontology language and structure, can can assist in designing better test suites to validate them, and overall help in the engineering and refinement of ontologies and software based on them.

Towards legal compliance by correlating Standards and Laws with a semi-automated methodology

Since generally legal regulations do not provide clear parameters to determine when their requirements are met, achieving legal compliance is not trivial. The adoption of standards could help create an argument of compliance in favour of the implementing party, provided there is a clear correspondence between the provisions of a specific standard and the regulation’s requirements. However, identifying such correspondences is a complex process which is complicated further by the fact that the established correlations may be overridden in time e.g., because newer court decisions change the interpretation of certain legal provisions. To help solve these problems, we present a framework that supports legal experts in recognizing correlations between provisions in a standard and requirements in a given law. The framework relies on state-of-the-art Natural Language Semantics techniques to process the linguistic terms of the two documents, and maintains a knowledge base of the logic representations of the terms, together with their defeasible correlations, both formal and substantive. An application of the framework is shown by comparing a provision of the European General Data Protection Regulation with the ISO/IEC 27018:2014 standard.