CT-T: Collaborative Research: A Semantic Framework for Policy Specification and Enforcement in a Need to Share Environment

我们生活在信息时代，在这个时代，数据和知识非常丰富，机器很容易移动、处理和挖掘。这使得发现知识和更有效地管理我们的事务变得更容易，但也增加了对信息保密性、隐私和信任的担忧。在未来几十年，平衡这些将是一项决定性的挑战，在当今负责国防、执法、紧急服务以及公共卫生和安全的组织中，这一挑战尤为紧迫。9/11委员会在他们的报告中谈到了这一点，并呼吁“从需要知道到需要分享”。该项目将探讨这一转变的一个具体方面--可执行政策如何帮助组织增强其共享信息和访问的能力，同时仍保持适当的安全、保密和隐私水平。马里兰大学、巴尔的摩县大学、德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校和德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校将在我们三所机构现有工作的基础上，开发和完善计算政策的概念框架，以支持需要共享的环境中的信息共享。我们的框架将集成和扩展我们在访问控制(RBAC)、使用控制(UCON)和道义策略(REI)方面的工作，以语义Web语言OWL表示的本体为基础。我们将使用它来设计策略规范语言，并列举所需的软件构件和工具。最后，我们将研究该框架在医疗记录和国土安全相关数据管理等实际应用中的适用性。

We live in the information age, a time when data and knowledge is plentiful and easily moved, processed and mined by machines. This makes it easier to discover knowledge and more efficiently manage our affairs but also increases concerns about information confidentiality, privacy and trust. Balancing these will be a defining challenge in the coming decades and is particularly urgent today in organizations responsible for national defense, law enforcement, emergency services, and public health and safety. The 9/11 Commission addressed this in their report and called for "a paradigm change from Need to Know to Need to Share". This project will explore one concrete aspect of this shift -- how executable policies can help organizations enhance their ability to share information and access while still maintaining appropriate levels of security, confidentiality and privacy.The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Dallas will build on existing work at our three institutions to develop and refine a a conceptual framework for computational policies to support information sharing in a need to share environment. Our framework will integrate and extend our work on access control (RBAC), usage control (UCON) and deontic policies (REI), grounding them in ontologies expressed in the Semantic Web language OWL. We will use it to design a policy specification language and enumerate required software artifacts and tools. Finally, we will study the framework applicability to realistic applications such as the management of healthcare records and homeland security related data.