Towards Secure Collaboration on the Semantic Web

Web technologies enable collaborative work to be done more efficiently and effectively. A user can share resources with others on the Web and perform his or her job based on a pre-defined policy for collaboration. During the collaboration, the user may need to create new resources, merge, split, exchange, or update resources created by other users. To support these services on the Web, we need machine-understandable as well as machine-readable metadata about the resources. The concept of a Semantic Web has been introduced to satisfy this requirement. Although the Semantic Web will provide more accurate and efficient services on the Web, it also introduces new problems that were not considered before, especially, in regards to security, interoperability, and transparency to users and organizations. In this paper, we discuss the requirements to support secure collaboration on the Semantic Web. We mainly focus on identification and analysis of the security problems associated with the Semantic Web, while suggesting possible solutions to each problem.