Granular Computing
A GrC-Based Approach to Social Network Data Protection
Da-Wei Wang1
, Churn-Jung Liau1
and Tsan-sheng Hsu1 
| (1) |
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan |
Abstract
Social network analysis is an important methodology in sociological research. Although social network data is very useful
to researchers and policy makers, releasing it to the public may cause an invasion of privacy. In this paper, we generalize
the techniques used to protect private information in tabulated data, and propose some safety criteria for assessing the risk
of breaching confidentiality by releasing social network data. We assume a situation of data linking, where data is released
to a particular user who has some knowledge about individual nodes of a social network. We adopt description logic as the
underlying knowledge representation formalism and consider the safety criteria in both open-world and closed-world contexts.
This work was partially supported by the Taiwan Information Security Center (TWISC) and NSC (Taiwan). NSC Grants: 94-2213-E-001-030
(D.W. Wang), 95-2221-E-001-029-MY3 (C.J. Liau), and 94-2213-E-001-014 (T-s. Hsu).