Access Control for Shared Ontologies

Abstract

Entities and their relationships for various fields of specialization can be described by ontologies. For example, the classes, relationships, and methods for designing a virus may be put into a Protégé ontology. If that design is to be integrated with a missile design, it will require a standard way of sharing and cross-referencing both classes and objects of the ontologies. This should be done in a secure way which only allows access to specified researchers using specified classes, relations, methods, and documentation. In this paper, we introduce a framework for ontology sharing that enables ontologies to easily be deployed on the web. Kernel0 is the ontology of classes, relations, attributes, and objects. It describes its own typing constraints and meta-data in the same way as data. Objects can have relationships to objects of other ontologies. Kernel-1 authorization definitions in our framework are able to dynamically determine the permissions of each user or group for queried objects. Our authorization has the ability to perform inferences via IS-A inheritance and by evaluating implicit relations and operator definitions. All modifications of values in the knowledge base are checked for both appropriate authorization and satisfaction of all typing constraints.