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A data providing service DPS in service-oriented architecture is tasked only with the retrieval of data that are annotated over a domain ontology. One particular motivating application of DPSs is their use within collaborative environments. An important characteristic for the enterprises of such a collaborative environment is the ability to employ data sharing with one another. A major concern in this situation is the protection of each enterprise's privacy while still permitting data sharing. One potential solution is to provide filtered data through access control. This work describes how to implement access control through fine-grained filtering of DPS response messages; it is accomplished using a filtering ontology and relations between the domain ontology of DPS and the proposed filtering ontology. Therefore, enterprises can write enterprise-specific access control policies referencing a common filtering ontology defined within a collaborative environment, enabling access control-based data sharing within the environment. This work additionally illustrates the implementation of our general solution to data providing web services, interpreted by an eXtensible Access Control Markup Language-based access control framework. The implementation is further evaluated in a case study of real world data, provided by a health research institute in London, Canada. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Web services facilitate the sharing of resources between groups within a collaborative environment. Privacy is an important concern when sharing data. Access control can be used to protect privacy by limiting the access privileges to the underlying resources. This paper outlines a framework for applying access control to data providing Web services. The framework makes use of ontologies allowing for a clear description of the functionality offered by the services within the collaborative environment. The implementation of the framework is described using XACML as a basis for the access control. XACML is extended to function with the defined ontologies in order to provide fine-grained access control. Finally, a case study is worked through showing how the proposed framework could be applied within a healthcare environment.