Data mining and Privacy in Public Sector using Intelligent Agents (discussion paper)

The public sector comprises government agencies, ministries, education institutions, health providers and other types of government, commercial and not-for-profit organisations. Unlike commercial enterprises, this environment is highly heterogeneous in all aspects. This forms a complex network which is not always optimised. A lack of optimisation and communication hinders information sharing between the network nodes limiting the flow of information. Another limiting aspect is privacy of personal information and security of operations of some nodes or segments of the network. Attempts to reorganise the network or improve communications to make more information available for sharing and analysis may be hindered or completely halted by public concerns over privacy, political agendas, social and technological barriers. This paper discusses a technical solution for information sharing while addressing the privacy concerns with no need for reorganisation of the existing public sector infrastructure . The solution is based on imposing an additional layer of Intelligent Software Agents and Knowledge Bases for data mining and analysis.