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Recent incidents involving the loss of personal information and identity theft have raised concerns worldwide over information privacy. In Japan, the Personal Information Protection Act went into effect in April 2005, requiring every enterprise to manage sensitive personal information on servers, workstations, and personal computers throughout the organization. This paper describes two tools we developed to assist in the management of personal information, aDesigner and the Personal Information Detection (PID) tool. The aDesigner tool scans an entire Web site to determine if each HTML page complies with the IBM privacy guidelines for external Web sites. PID is capable of automatically identifying "named entities," such as personal names, addresses, or telephone numbers in the textual parts of target files based on Japanese morphological analysis technology. This paper also summarizes the best practices used in IBM Japan for privacy management and presents statistical results concerning personal information gathered through deployment of these tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most cities, it is very challenging to both collect information from throughout a city, irrespective of agency or city function, and integrate this information into a broad decision-support environment. For example, this is particularly challenging for mature cities of the size and complexity of New York City, Tokyo, and London and for their managing agencies. Resource management for a city spans multiple domains including water and sanitation, buildings, transportation, energy, security, citizen services, and regional development. Implementing processes, policies, or interoperability features across multiple domains in a legacy city, as defined in this paper, requires significant coordination and "permission" among the agency players. Here, we propose a novel smarter-city maturity model that depicts the cross-domain and agency-to-agency interactions in response to an event (such as a water-main break). We also propose an enabling system architecture and multidomain-aware command portal that provide a detailed plan to address and optimize the management of resources for complex events. Finally, we propose a value-modeling method for quantifying the estimated cost of alternative scenarios and of selecting the best response to an event. To illustrate the approach, an example is given for a rainfall event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]