| Summary: | The World Wide Web in its current form, linking documents with hyperlinks in an associative network, has led to a number of concerns about issues related to privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. But the movement away from the linking of documents to the linking of data, a much more powerful paradigm allowing automation of a greater number of information processing tasks, will test legal and technical regimes still further. The linked data Web, in which heterogeneous data is brought together from distributed sources relatively seamlessly with user-provided ontologies, allows information about individuals or organizations to be queried despite being collected at different times for different purposes, with different provenances and different formats. The benefits of such a Web are manifest, but threats to personal privacy will also increase as boundaries blur between personal information published intentionally, that published conditionally (for example, to specific social networking sites for a specific audience) and information over which the subject has no control.
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