Ramblings of a compulsive engineer

Our first post on Linked Closed Data missed some important factors when we argued the inevitability of closed Linked Data publishing, namely — as the title of this post implies — privacy and confidentiality.

The need to provide access to sensitive data while maintaining confidentiality will be a major motivation for Closed Linked Data publishing. Rather than adopt a second format for publishing sensitive data, publishers will be keen to re-use existing Linked Data publishing infrastructure. The Linked Data community needs to converge on standards and develop implementations to support this as soon as possible.

Chris Gutteridge highlighted this in a post on the institutional data of the University of Southampton. For a university there are a number of uses a student might have for their own personal data, data which is confidential and thus cannot be published publicly. 

Chris points out that in this domain there are also some complicated issues regarding student sponsors which might arise if certain assesment data was available electronically. These issues are of course not specific to Linked Data publishing, but it is good to know that people give these issues thought.