Abstract
Personal data represent the e-history of a person and are of great significance to the person, but they are essentially produced and governed by various distributed services and there lacks a global and centralized view. In recent years, researchers pay attention to Personal Data Cloud (PDC) which aggregates the heterogeneous personal data scattered in different clouds into one cloud, so that a person could effectively store, acquire, and share their data. This paper makes a short survey on PDC research by summarizing related papers published in recent years. The concept, classification, and significance of personal data are elaborately introduced and then the semantics correlation and semantics representation of personal data are discussed. A multilayer reference architecture of PDC, including its core components and a real-world operational scenario showing how the reference architecture works, is introduced in detail. Existing commercial PDC products/prototypes are listed and compared from several perspectives. Five open issues to improve the shortcomings of current PDC research are put forward.