PENNI: Richtlinienbasiertes Internet der nächsten Generation

The Policy Enabled Next geNeration Internet (PENNI) project will lay the foundations for a policy, trust and transparency enabled decentralised Next Generation Internet (NGI), that can support intelligent agents that act on behalf of humans. Our hypothesis being that decentralised applications that are able to understand constraints (in the form of goals, preferences, norms and usage restrictions) together with trust and transparency mechanisms will give citizens more control over how their data is utilised and will foster trustworthiness in NGI applications, such as intelligent agents.   Starting from this hypothesis, we devise three primary research questions: (i) Can contextual information and policies afford users more control over NGI devices and agents? (ii) Can existing trust and transparency mechanisms be extended in order to support a trust-centric NGI? and (iii) Can existing Internet protocols and query mechanisms be extended to cater for a policy-aware intelligent agents? The Design Science Research methodology will guide the overall research from conception through to conclusion. Whereas, the Action Research methodology will be used in the design and development step of the DSR methodology to enable the refinement, of the policy language(s), the trust and transparency framework, and the communication protocols, via iterative reflection.   Concretely we will make the following contributions: Firstly, in terms of machine readable policies we will: demonstrate how a variety of usage policies can be attached to data and knowledge in a manner that supports the interoperability needs of collaborating agents; expand/enhance existing policy languages such that it is possible to express the goals and constraints needed to realise the Intelligent agent visions; and devise a framework that demonstrates how machine-readable policies can be embedded into the fabric of the NGI. Secondly, when it comes to trust and transparency we aim to: propose a NGI architectures where trust and transparency are first class citizens; and demonstrate how trust and transparency can be used to tackle anti social behaviour, such as fake news, filter bubbles, eco chambers and bias; Finally, from a Web protocols perspect we aim to: enhance the Linked Data Platform 1.0 with policy mechanisms necessary to support NGI intelligent agents; and extend the SPARQL 1.1 Protocol and the SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol with policy aware federated querying capabilities.   The project is conducted by Dr. Sabrina Kirrane from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, in close collaboration with other researchers from WU and also from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, Ghent University in Belgium and the University of Nantes in France.