System for Semantic Technology-based Access Management in a Port Terminal

Today's dynamic growth of the number of deployed solutions, based on the Internet of Things (IoT) concept, goes hand-in-hand with the need for new access control mechanisms. The Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) paradigm seems to be a good alternative to the, commonly used, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model, which does not necessarily work well in large-scale distributed systems. Specifically, the main drawback of the policy-based authorization solutions is the resulting high complexity of required policies, especially in the case of fine-grained access control (a clear case of lack of scalability). We believe that this problem can be appeased by incorporating semantic technologies into the decision-making process. In this paper we discuss a system for managing access control in a port terminal, based on application of semantic technologies. The proposed system is based on introduced and uses a modified version of the OntoPlay semantic application. The latter allows non-specialists to easily perform needed modifications of the ontology. The proposed system has been tested in a semi-realistic environment and in an emulator.