GeoPKDD Approach
The geographic privacy-aware knowledge discovery and delivery process, i.e., the GeoPKDD process that emerges from the advocated application scenario, has a general validity.
If the GeoPKDD process is built with solid theoretical foundations at an appropriate level of abstraction to deal with trajectories of moving objects, it may become an enabling driver for knowledge-based application of large impact.
To this aim, deeper and better focused foundational research of interdisciplinary nature is required, to support the following three main tasks in the GeoPKDD process.
- reconstruction of trajectories from streams of raw data about moving objects, and construction of a privacy-aware trajectories warehouse,
- spatio-temporal privacy-preserving data mining and knowledge extraction algorithms, yielding spatio-temporal patterns,
- geographic knowledge interpretation and visualization to deliver meaningful patterns to end users.
We plan to build some demonstrators of GeoPKDD applications, selected in the societal and telecom industry domains, counting on appropriate expertise available within the consortium.
Concerning privacy, real solutions can only be achieved through a combination of technical tools, legal regulations and social norms: while we investigate the technical advances needed to embed privacy into the data mining tools, we plan to activate a privacy regulation observatory, with the representatives of the national and European privacy authorities, as well as of non-governmental privacy-related associations. The observatory is aimed at harmonizing the activity in the project with existing regulations, as well as exploiting the feedback on norms and regulations from achievements in privacy-preserving methods developed within the project.
