Flexible Support for Multiple Access Control Models Using XML and RDF Schemata

Security is of critical importance for e-business systems, in which multiple internal and external enterprise applications and data are linked into one integrated system. It is a key factor that will determine how comfortable successful companies and their associated constituents are going to be with the idea of integrated e-business systems and the virtual enterprise. Existing proprietary access control APIs, schemes and representations have made uniform access semantics a very elusive and very expensive goal in the enterprise. To address this issue, it is necessary to develop standardized, platform agnostic and semantically meaningful representations for access control models. XML has been used in great effect to interchange and model data in a platform dependent fashion and it can be effectively used to represent complex access control relationships. Civil Engines Research plans to develop schemas that will effectively model enterprise access control ontologies and semantics in an extensible and interoperable manner. We plan on developing the schema instance processors and development tools necessary to enable the enforcement of access controls in an enterprise scenario. Phase 1 of this program will focus on assessing and demonstrating the feasibility of this approach by architecting and prototyping common access control models using XML Schema and the W3C recommended system for representing lightweight ontologies, RDF.