Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications
Fine-Grained Filtering to Provide Access Control for Data Providing Services within Collaborative Environments
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Journal
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
URL with Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3167
Abstract
A data providing service (DPS) in service-oriented architecture is tasked only with the retrieval of data that are annotated over a domain ontology. One particular motivating application of DPSs is their use within collaborative environments. An important characteristic for the enterprises of such a collaborative environment is the ability to employ data sharing with one another. A major concern in this situation is the protection of each enterprise's privacy while still permitting data sharing. One potential solution is to provide filtered data through access control. This work describes how to implement access control through fine-grained filtering of DPS response messages; it is accomplished using a filtering ontology and relations between the domain ontology of DPS and the proposed filtering ontology. Therefore, enterprises can write enterprise-specific access control policies referencing a common filtering ontology defined within a collaborative environment, enabling access control-based data sharing within the environment. This work additionally illustrates the implementation of our general solution to data providing web services, interpreted by an eXtensible Access Control Markup Language-based access control framework. The implementation is further evaluated in a case study of real world data, provided by a health research institute in London, Canada.
