Preserving Confidentiality in Ontologies: Can we Develop Secure Ontologies?

Many semantic web applications require selective sharing of ontologies due to copyright, confidentiality, business, security concerns and others. Our motivation is to protect the possibility to infer sensitive information and improperly extract it from the connected knowledge bases represented in ontologies. Supporting the design knowledge bases in order to overcome possible types of attacks. We give a brief description of a software tool we are currently building. We propose heuristics based on properties of ontologies and their planned use to identify and apply confidentiality preservation techniques that minimize the risk of breaches. Finally, we discuss several open problems.