Framework for information sharing across multiple government agencies under dynamic access policies

One of the government missions identified by the Federal Enterprise Architecture is to use computer and networking technologies to develop infrastructure to support information sharing within government organizations as well as with external stakeholders. Currently, considerable information is being maintained at individual organizations in the form of large repositories/digital libraries with no efficient means of sharing it with other government organizations and with other external user communities, including the general public. A major obstacle to information sharing is the lack of a framework and an infrastructure that allows government organizations to share information selectively with different user groups. Lack of such a framework creates unwillingness among government organizations to share their digital content. A mechanism needs to be in place where policy makers can specify which documents can be moved from one organization to another organization and/or who can access these transferred documents. Furthermore, a system is needed that enforces these policies in realtime when external events dictate a change of policies. In this paper, we propose a framework for specification, management and enforcement of dynamic access policies across multiple geographically distributed organizations. The framework can be instantiated to integrate with individual digital library systems and provide the necessary infrastructure to provide policy controlled access control management.