Towards a Fine-Grained Access Control Model and Mechanisms for Semantic Databases

A growing number of domains are adopting semantic models as a centralized gateway to multiple data sources, or directly for modeling and managing relevant information. In such contexts, granting access to the semantic model and its data only to the authorized users is a crucial requirement. In this paper, we present a fine-grained access control model specifically tailored to regulate access to semantic models. One of the relevant features of the model is the granularity of the resources that can be protected. Access control can be enforced at the level of both the model’s entities and the entities’ instances. Authorization decisions are determined by evaluating access control policies. An implementation of the proposed model adopting the XACML standard and the SeRQL query language is also discussed.