Implementation of a chain ontology based approach in the health care sector

Preserving privacy and managing data access have become crucial requirements for enterprises who deal with personal data. Hippocratic databases (Agrawal et al, 2002) and the Chain method (Fedaghi, 2007) have been proposed to support this through candid database design that includes responsibility for the privacy of data as a founding tenet. We identify, study, and implement several privacy-preserving features that extend the previous work on Limiting Disclosure in the Chain method. These features include the support of Ontology in the database design, Ontology design in OWL and applying a hybrid approach of Chains and Ontologies to a Health-care use case. The proposed approach tries to bring the Chain method one step closer to fitting real-world scenarios. We present the design and implementation guidelines of each of the proposed features. The evaluation of the design shows how the ontology has simplified the complicated work of designing the traditional Hippocratic and chain methods for real databases.