An Access Control Framework for the Web of Data

Abstract

As open data formats are becoming popular amongst Web developers, this gives rise to an increase in the creation and consumption of structured data. Data creators are easily linking diverse datasets which is creating a graph of interlinked data called the Web of Data. This increase in linked structured data demands mechanisms to ensure that access is controlled and granted to only those who are eligible to consume the data. However, although there is a lot of work done related to access control on the Web, this cannot be applied directly to structured data due to the different nature of how the data is formatted. Moreover, not much has been done to create fine-grained access control mechanisms for the Web of Data. In this paper we therefore present our access control framework that consists of a light-weight vocabulary for defining fine-grained privacy preferences for structured data and a privacy preference manager which allows users to (1) create privacy preferences based on our vocabulary and (2) restrict access to their data to third-party users.