Policy Enforcement for the Web of Data

Collecting data from the web is essential for research in social science, like digital marketing and applied economics, and for data research areas like Information Retrieval and Big Data. However, most of current methods for automatically collecting web data do not take into account principles of data protection policies. Therefore, it is crucial to realize a method that complies with legal, ethical, and license policies established by governments and associations. In this paper, we present a general framework for automatically collecting data from social networks which is able to preserve data privacy. We propose an ontology to capture the nature of social network data, and a procedure for translating web data into an OWL 2 ontology. Then we propose to use Semantic Web Technologies for formally expressing legal and ethical policies that regulate web data collection and mechanisms for being compliant with those policies.