Controlled query evaluation over OWL 2 RL ontologies

Abstract

We study confidentiality enforcement in ontology-based information systems where ontologies are expressed in OWL 2 RL, a profile of OWL 2 that is becoming increasingly popular in Semantic Web applications. We formalise a natural adaptation of the Controlled Query Evaluation (CQE) framework to ontologies. Our goal is to provide CQE algorithms that (i) ensure confidentiality of sensitive information; (ii) are efficiently implementable by means of RDF triple store technologies; and (iii) ensure maximality of the answers returned by the system to user queries (thus restricting access to information as little as possible). We formally show that these requirements are in conflict and cannot be satisfied without imposing restrictions on ontologies. We propose a fragment of OWL 2 RL for which all three requirements can be satisfied. For the identified fragment, we design a CQE algorithm that has the same computational complexity as standard query answering and can be implemented by relying on state-of-the-art triple stores. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.