Semantic conflict resolution for access and usage control

Eugenia I. Papagiannakopoulou, Nikolaos L. Dellas, Georgios V. Lioudakis, Maria N. Koukovini, Aziz Mousas

Keywords: Access and usage control, W3C ODRL, W3C DPV, ontology alignment, policy conflict resolution

TL;DR: This paper extends a semantic policy engine to incorporate mechanisms for semantic alignment with standardised ontologies, as well as for identifying and resolving conflicts between policies, including ODRL policies stemming from third parties.

Abstract:

Considering the use case when organisations acquire data from third parties and must align their processing to access and usage constraints set forth by the data providers, this paper targets a twofold goal: to allow for semantic interoperability of policies defined by different parties, and to allow for semantic conflict identification between these policies, and provide the means for their comprehensive resolution.
In this context, the policy engine of goodFlows, a semantic access and usage control framework, has been adapted in order to incorporate the mechanisms for the semantic alignment of its information model with standardised ontologies, as well as for effectively identifying and resolving conflicts between heterogeneous policies.
To this end, the main results of this paper are: an ontology-import mechanism that automatically aligns organisational information models with standard vocabularies such as DPV and ODRL; a bi-directional ODRL adaptor that translates ODRL structures into semantic attribute-based access and usage control rules and vice versa; and an enhanced Policy Decision Point (PDP) that applies jurisprudential precedence principles and is able to identify conflicts in complex settings and propose appropriate resolutions.

Submission Number: 5