Capturing semantics for information security and privacy assurance

Abstract

Security and privacy assurance is indispensable for ubiquitous access to information and resources. This paper focuses on the security and privacy provisions in a restricted organizational environment through access control mechanism. It includes the representation of the semantics of an organization and its access control mechanism exploiting the Web Ontology Language. The system controls access to the resources of an organization through differential access privileges. These are formulated based on the roles of the individuals, and the projects and departments they belong to. Instead of explicit definitions, some additional facts of the mechanism are inferred by executing semantic rules using the Jess rule engine over the designed ontology. These information are then passed back to the ontology to enrich it. The ontology is designed to cope with the organization restructuring with minimal efforts. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.