PENNI: Policy Enabled Next geNeration Internet

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented a distributed hyperlinked information system, known as the World Wide Web, which laid the foundations for a Social Web, which allows us to interact and collaborate, with people all over the world. The Next Genaration Internet is worldwide movement that aims to revolutionise the Internet for the third millennium and beyond. One active area of research entails using the Web to exchange data and knowledge in a manner that enables intelligent software agents to carry out data centric tasks on behalf of humans. In order to realise such a vision, agents need to know the constraints, in the form of goals, preferences, norms and usage restrictions, under which they operate; humans need to be able to trust both the data and knowledge needed to fulfill their goals and that the agent operates within the given constraints; and policies, trust and transparency mechanisms need to be build into the fabric of the Web. The Policy Enabled Next geNeration Internet (PENNI) project will lay the technical 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 decentralized 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 humans more control over how their data is utilised and will foster trustworthiness in NGI applications, such as intelligent agents and devices. In PENNI we combine the Design Science Research together with the Action Research methodology in order to iteratively develop and refine the policy language(s), trust and transparency framework, and Internet communication protocols, that are necessary to a support policy, trust and transparency enabled decentralised Next Generation Internet. Concretely we will make the following contributions: - Firstly, in terms of machine-readable policies we will 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 will develop a NGI architecture 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, echo chambers and bias; - Finally, from a Web protocols perspect we aim to enhance standard Web protocols with policy awareness.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented a distributed hyperlinked information system, known as the World Wide Web, which laid the foundations for a social web, which allows individuals and organisations to interact and collaborate with one another. The Next Generation Internet is a worldwide movement that aims to revolutionise the Internet for the third millennium and beyond. One active area of research entails using the web to exchange data and knowledge in a manner that enables intelligent software agents to carry out data centric tasks on behalf of humans. In order to realise such a vision, agents need to know the goals and constraints under which they operate; humans need to be able to trust both the data and knowledge needed to fulfil their goals, and that the agent operates within the given constraints; and these policies, trust, and transparency mechanisms need to be built into the fabric of the Web. The Policy Enabled Next geNeration Internet (PENNI) project lays the technical foundations for a policy, trust, and transparency enabled decentralised Next Generation Internet (NGI), that can support software web agents that act on behalf of humans. Our hypothesis being that decentralized applications that are able to understand constraints (in the form of goals, preferences, norms, and usage restrictions) together with trust and transparency mechanisms (in the form of usage control and fact checking) will give citizens more control over how their data is utilised and will foster trustworthiness in NGI applications, such as intelligent agents. The PENNI project is multidisciplinary in nature, and is positioned at the intersection of web engineering, logic, distributed systems, and artificial intelligence. PENNI has contributed to the advancement of the web knowledge governance research field in terms of knowledge representation; data usage control and agent governance; as well as fact checking and misinformation detection. PENNI knowledge representation contributions include: a methodology to extract legal knowledge from text and encode it in a knowledge graph that facilitates machine access to legal information by devices and agents; and a language that can be used to represent various policies, preferences, and norms in a machine readable format that facilitates usage control of devices and agents. Primary research outcomes in terms of data usage control and agent governance include: a framework for efficient privacy-preserving querying; a resource governance conceptual framework and a blockchain and trusted execution environment instantiation; and a benevolent and trustworthy agent architecture. Additional contributions from a trust perspective include: a temporal fact checking approach that uses multiple sources of background knowledge to assess the veracity and temporal validity of a given assertion; and a workflow for detecting misinformation based on different linguistic cues applied to different datasets.