Ontology-Based Matching of Security Attributes for Personal Data Access in e-Health

This paper discusses an interoperability solution (tool) for the internal management of a policy decision engine located at the level of the authorization layer of a service oriented environment. The tool aims to support federated access control in the context of distributed architectures, in which a local authorization policy is not able to recognize all the attributes in the authorization decision requests. The approach is based on an ontology-based interoperation service (OBIS) whose role is to translate security attributes (name-value pairs) from local security vocabularies into the attributes recognized by the central (Master Policy Decision Point) vocabulary based on a security ontology and its domain-specific extensions which provides semantic reasoning services. The approach is validated in an e-Health scenario for the access of patient data for diabetes patient monitoring and disease management.