An ontology based access control service for cross-domain e-learning resource sharing

To improve c-learning resource sharing, the service grid is becoming a powerful choice due to its great computing capabilities under heterogeneous and distributed environments, whereas security brings its applications a serious challenge. After analyzing the security requirements of c-learning resource grids, this paper proposes a unified infrastructure to implement the resource access control service across security domains. To alleviate the workload from the large number of user, attribute-based authorization is used to facilitate mapping users to limited "roles" and enhance semantics. Before the formal authorization evaluation, a pretreatment is enforced to reduce the workload from cross-domain service. By constructing ontologies, cross-domain policies are converted to carry out flexible authorization. Context computing is applied to sense the resource environment in order to enforce the adaptive access control. Based on GT4.0 and relevant standards, the unified security infrastructure is implemented, and its application suggests that this approach is effective for c-learning resource management.