Ontology Based Access Control

As computer technologies become pervasive, the need for access control mechanisms grow. The purpose of an access control is to limit the operations that a computer system user can perform. Thus, access control ensures to prevent an activity which can lead to a security breach. For the success of Semantic Web, that allows machines to share and reuse the information by using formal semantics for machines to communicate with other machines, access control mechanisms are needed. Access control mechanism indicates certain constraints which must be achieved by the user before performing an operation to provide a secure Semantic Web. In this work, unlike traditional access control mechanisms, an "Ontology Based Access Control" mechanism has been developed by using Semantic Web based policies. In this mechanism, ontologies are used to model the access control knowledge and domain knowledge is used to create policy ontologies.