An agent-based architecture to add security in a Cooperative Information System

Nowadays, information is considered a strategic, rather than an operational, resource for those organizations needing to share, and access to, heterogeneous and geographically widely-distributed information sources. Solutions proposed in industrial or academic research solve the problems linked to technical and semantic heterogeneity and take into account the principles of autonomy, transparency and evolutivity. However, few of these solutions consider the critical aspect of access control security in these architectures. This paper deals with this security aspect in a cooperative information system and is about the design of a system able to manage and control access security to global information shared among its stakeholders.