A methodology and tools for semantic interoperability within a trusted architecture for securely shared services

Ioana Ciuciu

Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble (SIGMA team)

Jeudi 21/03/2013 à 14h00

Amphithéatre F107, INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot

Abstract

The end-to-end transmission and processing of personal information within and between large scale (multi-national) federated environments needs to ensure the correct interpretation and implementation of data protection policies. Next generation architectures, enabling services for personal information sharing and processing in a trusted and secured way, need to take into account the heterogeneous, context-dependent and highly dynamic aspects of the participating systems. A central aspect and challenge in such a (open) system is the semantic interoperability between its building blocks, processes and users. A semantic-based methodology is proposed in order to solve this problem, together with its implementing tools: 1) an ontology-based service for security concept matching for authorization policy interoperability; and 2) a business process (BP) annotator and recommender. The first tool (1) solves the access control decision in the policy engine by computing the domination relation between two security concepts: one inferred from an access request term and the other from a local authorization policy term (specific to a certain organization in the federation, e.g., a hospital department). This ensures that all service providers do not need to support the same policy language and those policies in different languages can be passed between providers and still enforced by them. The semantic BP annotator tool (2) provides assistance to the process modeler when specifying security constraints for the business process models (BPM) that orchestrate the framework. The system is able not only to support the process modeler with syntactically correct security concepts, but also to assist him with annotation suggestions. The suggestions are made according to information retrieved from the knowledge base which is matched against the process modeler input (knowledge). The methodology and the corresponding tools are validated in an employability use case scenario.

Speaker's biography

Dr. Ioana Ciuciu is assistant professor at Joseph Fourier University (UJF) in Grenoble, France. She is member of the SIGMA research group at Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG). During the past few years, Ioana has been actively involved in national and European projects (OSCB1, FP6 3DAH2, FP7 TAS33), where she developed tools and methodologies based on semantic technologies, as member of the Semantics Technology & Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab), at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Ioana obtained her PhD at the University of Reims, France, in 2009. During her doctoral studies, she has been working on the integration of the user domain knowledge with surface deformations in an innovative CAD system. Her research interests are ontology engineering, knowledge management, knowledge representation, collaborative learning, and human-computer interaction applied to various business domains. Ioana acted as evaluator for EU FP7 projects and as program committee member of several peer-reviewed international conferences and journals.