Content-based access control in an online community

Abstract

This research demonstrates how semantic web can provide a solution for controlling access to contents around a community. The main intention of online communities are enabling a plat-form for users to share information with each other. But there may be some information to which access must be restricted, such as the personal information of an user in the National ID Network. Traditional OSNs or other online communities provide very few or no controlling ac-cess to these information semantically. In this thesis, we have proposed a semantic approach to enhance the access control in any online community depending on the sensitivity of information content. The proposed framework takes into account the information of an individual present against a National ID. An online community is assumed for the sharing of these information based on how sensitive they are for the users possessing the information. We present a detailed framework of the model in a semantic approach and formulate policies for users to control the access of their shared contents. The model is evaluated with some experimental scenarios with synthetic data and the related results have been presented. Moreover, we also mention ma-jor challenges such as the complexity of the model and supervisory settings in access control paradigm and show how our model can meet them. Lastly, the proposed model also meets the open area regarding sticky policies and co-privacy related to a shared content.