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Providing Real Integration in Multi-disciplinary Environments

Project description


Integrating Technologies for the Fast and Flexible Manufacturing Enterprise
Information age, protecting privacy and identity

Using the internet to book a flight, purchase a book or network with friends may seem like a harmless activity. But in each of these online transactions we leave behind scraps of information about our personal lives that could be misused.

As information technology becomes more pervasive and more powerful, the risks of having our personal privacy violated or, worse, our identities stolen, have increased.

We expose a little bit more information about ourselves every time we fill out an online form, input our credit card number to make a purchase, or let a website store our personal data.

As anyone who has been a victim of online identity theft knows, in the current information age it has become too easy for criminals to join the dots linking our virtual and real lives.

Different IDs for different uses

But what if we could easily use different virtual identities in different situations to keep our true identities anonymous? And what if we could track every piece of personal data we revealed? Those two steps, say a team of European researchers, would greatly enhance privacy.

Working in the PRIME project, the team developed tools to achieve a greater degree of personal security for online users. One feature of their approach is the use of private credentials and digital certificates. These marry the need for accountability – such as proving a person is over 18 to enter some websites – with the need for anonymity.

Once they have been issued with a master certificate from a commercial identity provider, such as online payment operators, users can have different pseudonyms and identities on different websites by creating a number of anonymous sub-certificates for themselves. This ability protects their privacy and also allows issuers to revoke the master certificate if the user abuses the sub-certificates for other ends.

Keeping track of your personal data

The PRIME team also created a way to track what personal information is revealed to whom and a means to ensure the data is being used in compliance with the privacy policy the person accepted.

The project’s Data Track software tool lets people keep a record of what information they put online, just as the web history of a web browser records what websites they visit. The tool also lets the user query how that information is being used at a later date, helping to make sure that a particular website, online store or service provider continues to comply with their own privacy policies.

Sticky privacy policies

In addition, so-called ‘sticky’ privacy policies ensure that the agreement on personal information the person accepted for the website remains attached to their data even if it is passed between different organisations.

The project partners foresee a rapidly expanding market for privacy enhancing technologies, such as Data Track, as the internet starts to be used for an increasing variety of activities.

Such technologies should also help shore up internet users’ confidence in using the web for more activities, thus paving the way for more online services such as e-commerce, and e-government.

The main objective of the PRIME project is to give business professionals a learning environment where they can experiment with new ideas and learn how to handle the entire life cycle of products and processes for all stakeholders of the organization. PRIME proposes to achieve this by enhancing current work environments with a new paradigm based on serious gaming. This will provide the means for learning by experience within a virtual environment that is safe and foments risk taking without detrimental impact on the business. The experience garnered is based on strategic management, including multi-stakeholder negotiation and business connectivity. The technological objectives are: - The development of a virtual business environment based on a simulation model of strategic manufacturing; - The system architecture supporting the virtual business environment; - The development of a PRIME client that supports ubiquitous platforms and has flexible interfaces; - The design and development of intelligent virtual stakeholders; - The adoption of the intelligent virtual stakeholders technologies to develop agents that complement the user's activities in virtual business environment. From these workpackages, the main project outputs will be: - User requirements for the serious gaming approach - Specification of the software architecture - Functional specifications of the gaming environment - The PRIME toolset, software, and content library - Three pilot studies - Exploitation plan The main impacts from PRIME are expected to be: - Reinforcing competitiveness through training of professionals in various expected or unexpected scenarios - Reinforcing economic growth by allowing optimisation of business operations through simulation and evaluation of various scenarios - Reinforcing sustainability of products, industrial, and business systems by allowing stakeholders to obtain better knowledge and evaluate sustainability issues through PRIME gaming

Fields of science

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

FP6-2004-IST-NMP-2
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Coordinator

STIFTELSEN SINTEF
EU contribution
€ 469 466,00
Address
STRINDVEIEN 4
7034 Trondheim
Norway

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Norge Trøndelag Trøndelag
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Total cost
No data

Participants (15)

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Last update: 1 April 2017

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/016542

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