thrashor

inside the man

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

A taxonomy of privacy

I was recently at an ISACA breakfast where the guest speaker, Robert Garigue, CSO of BMO Group, surprised me by peppering his security presentation with "soft", unquantifiable concepts such as semiotics, ontologies, taxonomies, knowledge, and meaning throughout his presentation to the assembled group of audit and control professionals. Perhaps my seemingly unrelated interests in religion, library and information science, and information security are related after all? With this thought echoing in my mind, I was interested to see Bruce Schneier's post referencing Daniel Solove's legal paper on the taxonomy of privacy.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mabye they are not so "soft" anymore as they get operationalized in XML and OWL...In fact, they become actionable. True, they are still limited in many respects but then any thing that is able evolve into higher levels of abstraction also enables higher levels of controls and possibilities.

7:47 AM
thrashor said...

Garigue also referenced the inexorable evolution of information from the simple to the complex. A similar continuous process could be pointed out with respect to the evolution of human knowledge - at least in the western world - which strives to make the implicit explicit. In this light, OWL has emerged to make the implicit or only partially explicit relationships between ideas fully explicit. The question is, does OWL do a good job at this? Certainly, it provides a degree of machine readability that was not previously available, but can the relationships between ideas really be accurately expressed by such a limited set of links?

8:46 AM

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Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Returned to working as a Management Consultant, specializing in risk, security, and regulatory compliance, with Fujitsu Canada after running the IT shop in the largest library in the South Pacific.

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