Semantic Access Control in Web Based Communities

Web based social communities are one of the most widely used applications nowadays. Ubiquitous computing and access capabilities leverage the evolution of highly dynamic social communities. Recently, security and privacy concerns within these communities have increased significantly. This paper addresses these challenges by controlling access to community resources exploiting semantic Web technologies. In this regard, a conceptual community framework and its access control mechanisms are formalised using the Web ontology language. Access to the resources is controlled by defining differential access rights based on the relationships between the individuals and the communities. Instead of an explicit definition, some additional facts of the mechanisms are inferred by executing semantic Web rules using the Jess rule engine over the designed ontology. These information are then passed back into the ontology to enrich the existing ontology.