Usage control for data handling in smart cities

Data in smart cities is commonly generated by a large variety of participants including institutional actors, equipment manufacturers, network operators, infrastructure providers, service providers, and end users. This data potentially undergoes several transformations such as aggregation and/or composition before finally being consumed. In this context of sharing data between diverse consumers, it is essential to provide the data producers the means by which they can exercise control over how and by whom the data is used. To date, usage control has received attention in the domains of the web and social networks, in terms of confidentiality, privacy and access control aspects. However, it has not yet been fully applied in a rigorous manner in the context of smart cites. In this paper we study usage control with the goal to address the problem of providing stakeholders more control over their data and enforcing accountable management of such data. We first propose a new data usage policy, called DUPO, which captures the diversity of obligations and constraints resulting from the usage control requirements for smart cities. Next, we apply a defeasible logic based approach on DUPO to formally define rule language, solve rule conflicts, and elaborate reasoning. We then introduce the data handling mechanism, which provides useful functionality to process consumer's request, ensuring the accountability of the policy enforcement, and traceability of the data usage. To this end we benefit from SPINdle reasoner to implement the proposed usage control module covered main functionalities of the mechanism.