RE: Beginning work on an official Web Access Control spec.

Hi Guys,

I too am interested in this topic. However my work has focused more on supplementing the RDF data model with access control in general and reasoning over access control policies in particular.

We actually have a talk on this topic "Secure Manipulation of Linked Data" @ISWC2013 on Friday.

I would be delighted to help out.

Regards,
Sabrina
________________________________
From: Andrei Sambra [andrei.sambra@gmail.com]
Sent: 17 October 2013 14:05
To: public-webid; public-rww@w3.org; Linked Data Platform Working Group; public-lod@w3.org; Tim Berners-Lee
Subject: Beginning work on an official Web Access Control spec.

Dear all,

For those of you who know me, please skip this paragraph. For the others, I would first like to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Sambra and for the past three years I have been involved in different W3C groups, such as WebID, LDP and RWW (co-chair). As an advocate of Semantic Web technologies, especially those taking user privacy into consideration, I am currently working on two projects, MyProfile [1] (WebID provider / social network) and RWW..IO<http://RWW.IO> [2], the later including support for WebID, LDP and WAC [3]. RWW.IO<http://RWW.IO> is a Read/Write Web-based personal data store.

Over the past few years, we have noticed that Linked Data is no longer a technology limited to the public space, finding its way into consumer applications. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly important to be able to protect access to private/sensitive resources. To this regard, the Web Access Control (WAC) ontology [3] has been put together by Tim Berners-Lee, offering the basic means to set up ACLs. Due to its nature (i.e. an ontology) however, it does not provide the formalism necessary to implement it in order to achieve interoperability, nor does it provide an organized space where it can be discussed and improved.

The reason behind writing the email is that I would like to know how many people are interested in participating to the standardization process of a Web Access Control spec.

The Read Write Web community group has so far been the host of inquiries regarding the WAC ontology. However, being a community group, it does not have access to W3C's teleconference system, nor to the issue tracking system. Depending on your interest in a WAC spec, and the preliminary discussions we might have, we may very well have to create a dedicated working group. For now however, I suggest we use the public RWW list (public-rww@w3.org<mailto:public-rww@w3.org>) in order to coordinate the efforts on this subject.

Please let me know how you stand on this subject and perhaps suggest a way to count who is interested in participating (doodle, something else maybe?)..

Best wishes,
Andrei

[1] https://my-profile.eu/
[2] https://rww.io/
[3] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl<http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl>