Using semantic policies for ad-hoc coalition access control

Coalition access control models are required in order to properly manage access to resources among different collaborating organizations. When these relationships are long term inter-organizational agreements and policies can be established that can satisfy appropriate access to the resources owned by those entities. When these coalitions are spontaneous access rights to resources among the parties in the coalition need to be specified by users and must be context dependant. A good example of this is in ad-hoc collaborative scenarios. Controlling access to private services being shared within the collaborative group is a challenge in these scenarios. This paper presents a semantic web approach in order to represent context that can be shared and used by a policy engine to form dynamic groups based on the context of the situation, as well as manage access to the private web services that each group introduces to the ad-hoc collaborative environment. The approach leverages the distributed policy framework (Rein) built on top of a rule-base reasoner (CWM).