Ontology-Based Policy Specification and Management

Abstract

Abstract. The World Wide Web makes it easy to share information and resources, but offers few ways to limit the manner in which these resources are shared. The specification and automated enforcement of security-related policies offer promise as a way of providing controlled sharing, but few tools are available to assist in policy specification and management, especially in an open system such as the Web, where resource providers and users are often strangers to one another and exact and correct specification of policies will be crucial. In this paper, we propose the use of ontologies to simplify the tasks of policy specification and administration, discuss how to represent policy inheritance and composition based on credential ontologies, formalize these representations and the according constraints in Frame-Logic, and present POLICYTAB, a prototype implementation of our proposed scheme as a Protégé plug-in to support policy specification.

PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services

“…This has a number of limitations: (i) it leads to ad-hoc reasoning about policy compliance, one which is tied to the specific vocabularies that express the rules according to which the reasoning takes place; (ii) it limits the reusability and portability of policies; (iii) it precludes the identification of inter-policy relations; (iv) it limits the ability to perform policy governance. In order to overcome such limitations, semanticallyrich approaches to the specification of policies have been brought to the attention of the research community [17,32,40]. These generally embrace Semantic Web representations for capturing what we term action-oriented policies, i.e.…”

Checking Compatibility and Replaceability in Web Services Business Protocols with Access Control

“…Policy languages grounded in Semantic Web technologies allow policies to be described over heterogeneous domain data and promote common understanding among participants who might not use the same information model. There are two main advantages of using ontology in policy specification and management [22]:…”

Selective data replication for distributed geographical data sets

“…Use of multiple policy languages without having a common vocabulary leads to ambiguity and unnecessary complexity, and also impacts upon the correctness and accuracy of system behaviour if policies are ill-or incompletely specified. Therefore, more recent research (Jung et al 2004, Toninelli et al 2005, Nejdl et al 2005, Grimm et al 2004) defines policies based on ontologies in order to overcome the aforementioned issues. In addition, compared to non-ontology based policy specification, ontology based policy specification could inherit any advantages from ontology definition that would not be available otherwise; for example, Nejdl et al (2005) borrowed the notions of inheritance and polymorphism from object-oriented modelling, and applied them to policy specification and management.…”