Social Web Ontology for Public Services

In the Social Web, a large number of individuals stores and shares private data in social networks like Facebook and Twitter. By agreeing with their license agreements that support a revenue model, which is mostly advertising, occasionally combined with (premium) subscription and transactions, these individuals transfer data ownership to these social networks. As individuals, citizens store a lot of data in social networks that is also relevant to government. This chapter proposes an open peer-to-peer social network architecture, based on data ownership by each individual and a Social Web Ontology for interoperability between the peers. Security mechanisms are an important feature of such a network. By extending the Social Web Ontology with concepts and properties for e-Government Services and applying open data principles, the architecture can also be used by authorities. The proposed architecture includes an advertising revenue model that can be offered by intermediaries storing user owned data. All will prosper by sharing as much data as they are willing, thus interoperability amongst providers is required. An architecture in which a citizen not only can own its data, maintain its social network and sells its data to advertisers, but also provides data to authorities to apply for particular government services, addresses both dat but in some occasions also on subscriptions a privacy challenges and eGovernment services. Authorities can play an important role by stimulating the implementation of a Social Web Ontology, initiate the development of data privacy monitoring modules warning users of potential privacy issues when selling data, and base public services on the Social Web Ontology. It will also allow users to present themselves differently in different contexts based on access control settings, e.g. private, professional, and citizen.