Abstract: A key challenge for Location-based services (LBSs) is to offer personalized contents while preserving the privacy of consumers. Consumers’ privacy preferences are typically expressed as policies where they state the rules under which access is granted or denied to their information. We propose a solution that includes an access control model for protecting customer profiles and location information. We also propose a mechanism that enforces the spatio-temporal policies. We extend our solution by employing semantic knowledge and reasoning techniques to be able to address other challenges such as enforcing privacy preferences that are based on incentives offered in promotions. Our solution uses the Ontology Web Language (OWL) to create an ontology that includes taxonomies for Location, Time, Merchants, Incentives, and Products. In our solution, we model both consumer preferences and merchant queries as Description Logic expressions and answer merchant queries by reasoning about consumer preferences that match the queries. We present the system architecture and show how this architecture is related to other e-commerce applications.

Biography: Nabil R. Adam is a Professor of Computers and Information Systems, the Founding Director of the Center for Information Management, Integration and Connectivity (CIMIC), Director of the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute, and the Director of the Laboratory for Water Security at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. Dr. Adam published numerous technical papers in such journals as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Computing Surveys, Communications of the ACM, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Int. Journal of Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems. He coauthored/ co-edited ten books including ``Electronic Commerce: Technical, Business, and Legal Issues'', Prentice Hall, 1998, a book on Databases Issues in GIS, Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1997 and one on Electronic Commerce (1996), published as part of the Springer Verlag Lecture Notes Series in Computer Science. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Digital Libraries and serves on the Editorial board of a number of journals including Journal of Management Information Systems and the Journal of Electronic Commerce and the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. He also served as a guest editor for the Communications of the ACM, Operations Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems.

Dr. Adam’s research work has been supported for over $14 million from various federal, state agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Security Agency (NSA), NOAA, US Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the NJ Meadowlands Commission, and NASA.

He is the co-founder of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries and served as the General Chair of the 1997 "IEEE International Conference on the Advances in Digital Libraries (IEEE ADL'97)", the Program Chair of the 1996 the "Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries", the Program Co-chair of the 1995 "Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries", and the Program Chair of the 1994 "International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management". He was elected as a distinguished speaker in the IEEE Computer Society's Distinguished Visitors Program (DVP) for the period 1997-2000.

More information may be found at: http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~adam/