Revisiting Ontology Based Access Control: The Case for Ontology Based Data Access

Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) is a semantic paradigm to perform a mapping between an ontology and a data source for querying heterogeneous data sources. The result of this mapping ensures data access and data integration. Therefore, OBDA allows to query various datasets and provides data virtualization by integrating multiple and varied data sources. Ontology Based Access Control (OBAC) enables the realization of an access control mechanism by using Semantic Web technologies. OBAC allows to model the access control knowledge and uses domain knowledge to create policy ontologies. This paper revisits the OBAC approach by considering the OBDA to query legacy data that are stored in different types of data sources. For this purpose, OBAC is examined within the scope of OBDA and a conceptual model is proposed to extend OBAC with OBDA to provide data virtualization and to consolidate users' access privileges. Thus, security and management of complex information systems could be carried out by using Semantic Web technologies.