Upcoming Meetings

A face-2-face meeting is being planed as part of the W3C TPAC Week in October. More details to follow and confirmation announced to the PLING Mailing list.

News

PLING expects valuable input from the PrimeLife EU-IST Project that was started 1 March 2008. PrimeLife will touch on a variety of different policy languages that will have to work together. This issue is in the core scope of PLING.

Participate

PLING, the Policy Languages Interest Group is a forum open to the Public. To join the Interest Group, please subscribe to its mailing list.

The PLING is capturing use cases, languages and frameworks, and related projects on the PLING Wiki.

Introduction

For the past 9 years, the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) was at the center of the W3C Privacy Activity. The P3P Specification Working Group has issued the P3P 1.0 Recommendation in 2002. New work items were enthusiastically welcomed at two Workshops on short term evolutions and on longer term visions. Those two workshops triggered work on P3P 1.1. New work on a P3P 1.1 Specification was started already in late 2002. P3P 1.1 was developed until Last Call. But following the events of 9/11, there was a change in the privacy landscape that slowly eroded the support for P3P 1.1. The privacy battle recentered around defense against governmental data collection. This led to insufficient momentum for implementations of P3P 1.1. The P3P 1.1 Specification Working Group therefore decided to complete its work on P3P 1.1 by delivering a W3C Working Group Note on 13 November 2006. The P3P Specification Working Group was closed on 21 November 2006.

During the course of its work, the P3P Specification Working Group delivered multiple important milestones for the Web; see the Privacy Activity Statement for details.

Starting around 2004, W3C Staff and community members were involved in research on next generation Privacy in several projects including PAW, TAMI and PRIME. The research widened P3P's approach to render transactions and network interactions more transparent. P3P already struggled with the notion of identity, and with the ability to connect to different levels of business data models. Indeed, identity notions are at the core of linking privacy policies, access control decisions, and business rules to the Web. Various notions of identity are used by specifications including P3P, XACML, SAML, and by various emerging online identity frameworks.

To open the findings and experiences gathered to a larger audience's scrutiny and test out the reaction of the industry, W3C held the Workshop on Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation and Semantics-Driven Enforcement (report) in October 2006. At the workshop, the area of policy language interoperability and mapping was identified as a key issue for the near-term follow-up: While there seemed to be no interest among participants in creating a new, all-encompassing access control and obligation language, there was significant interest in exploring the interfaces between different, possibly domain-specific policy languages. Ontologies and common modeling principles could help combine these languages and also help enable automatic translation between different languages. Important contributions in this area could include a standardized language to describe evidence; mechanisms for the discovery of ontologies.

PLING is the a reference point where like minded people come together to discuss issues around policy languages and their combination. New ideas can be presented and scrutinized. Issues concerning the combination of several existing languages should be discussed and solutions suggested.