OSNAC: An Ontology-based Access Control Model for Social Networking Systems

As the information flowing around in social networking systems is mainly related or can be attributed to their users, controlling access to such information by individual users becomes a natural requirement. The intricate semantic relations among data objects, different users, and between data objects and users further add to the complexity of access control needs. In this paper, we propose an access control model based on Semantic Web technologies that takes into account the above mentioned complex relations. The proposed model enables expressing much more fine-grained access control policies on a social network knowledge base than the few existing models. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed access control framework.