Policy Definition and Enforcement for Virtual Enterprises

Net-centric enterprise solutions that include semantic integration techniques coupled with distributed service oriented architectures provide unprecedented potential to increase the warfighter’s situational awareness. The Knowledge Management Framework (KMF) for the US Air Force 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is one such solution. With its ability to integrate a variety of structured and unstructured sources to represent a single integrated range picture that supports queries, searches, and viewing, KMF represents the power of the net-centric paradigm. It also represents the challenges facing net-centric access control. Traditional access control approaches that offer point solutions for stove-piped data silos are too simplistic, and rigid for an environment such as KMF, where information is being dynamically combined with other information to create new meaning on the fly. The Securboration Team’s comprehensive approach bases policy on meaning of semantically integrated data and the processes that access it. Our approach to access control provides targeted solutions for the 45th Space Wing while providing a modular product that meets evolving net-centric standards.