Secure Heterogeneous Information Presentation (heterogeneous content on heterogeneous platforms)

The networked society is entirely dependent on the access to and use of information. A typical problem for a user is that the information he is seeking is available but not organised in the way matching his actual needs. E.g., it is in different format w hich does not conform to user's interface, it has a different logical structure which is not handled properly by the user's software, the user is not authorised to access it, typically, for some security reasons. By "presentation" in the title we mean the general process of information disclosure, exchange and use. It poses problems like those just mentioned to the user, and puts serious demands on the service providers in order to circumvent them. This project takes up the challenge of addressing in a systematic way this very problem. It does aim at providing a general framework of wide applicability for disseminating heterogeneous content on heterogeneous platforms in a way which ensures consistency of various presentations, is adaptable to the needs of the particular user and does not compromise the security issues. The major challenge is to combine the presentation aspect (the desired flexibility to adapt to different preferences/technical possibilities of different user/platform combinations, and even to the possibly changing preferences of one user) with the security aspect (the concern for the adequacy, consistency and security of the presented information and offered services). These aspects are of course inter-dependent. The appoach will be to define a language for specifying presentation patterns, design a type discipline as basic security mechanism, define a specifation formalism for application/context dependent security aspects and develop (together with industrial partners) a prototype to test and validate the methodology.