Title: Ontology-based access control for social network systems

Authors: Amirreza Masoumzadeh; James Joshi

Addresses: School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. ' School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA

Abstract: As the information flowing around in social network systems is mainly related or can be attributed to their users, controlling access to such information by individual users becomes a crucial requirement. The intricate semantic relations among data objects, different users, and between data objects and users further add to the complexity of access control needs. In this paper, we propose an access control model based on semantic web technologies that takes into account the above mentioned complex relations. The proposed model enables expressing much more fine-grained access control policies on a social network knowledge base than the existing models. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed access control framework and evaluating its performance.

Keywords: social network systems; SNSs; privacy; access control; semantic web; social networking; ontology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPSI.2011.043731

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2011 Vol.1 No.1, pp.59 - 78

Published online: 27 Nov 2014 *

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