A Graph-Based Formalism for Controlling Access to a Digital Library Ontology

This paper presents a graph-based formalism for an Ontology Based Access Control (OBAC) system applied to Digital Library (DL) ontology. It uses graph transformations, a graphical specification technique based on a generalization of classical string grammars to nonlinear structures. The proposed formalism provides an executable specification that exploits existing tools of graph grammar to verify the properties of a graph-based access control mechanism applicable to a digital library ontology description. It also provides a uniform specification for controlling access not only at the concept level but also at the level of the documents covered by the concepts including node obfuscation, if required.