Towards information security ontology in business networks

The existing business information and asset protection models are mainly based on organizational aspects of security management. Having the focal company as the unit of analysis makes it difficult to represent the complex network-wide phenomena, for example inter-organizational knowledge exchange and dynamic nature of security requirements. Here, a future research perspective is outlined, that makes ground to enable the design of ontologies applicable in the domain of knowledge exchange and information security in business networks. The topics that should be addressed include conceptual review of existing security models, analysis of business resource classification approaches, extending service oriented roles-linkage relationship models with network-wide security requirements, and the research perspectives in knowledge integration and requirements engineering. © 2009 The authors and IOS Press.