Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Secure Semantic Web Services
Bhavani Thuraisingham
University of Texas at Dallas
bhavani.thuraisingham@utdallas.edu
Summary.
Web Services refer to the technologies that allow for making connec-
tions. Semantic web consists of technologies that enable machine understandable
web pages. Web services make use of semantic web technologies to understand the
web pages, conduct reasoning and take actions. Such web services are semantic web
services. For many applications the semantic web services have to be secure. In this
chapter we discuss secure web services, secure semantic web technologies and finally
discuss the integration of secure web services with secure semantic web technologies
to develop secure semantic web services.
1 Introduction
As stated in [1], Web Services refer to the technologies that allow for mak-
ing connections. Services are what you connect together using Web Services.
Examples of web services are query service and directory service. A service
is the endpoint of a connection. Also, a service has some type of underlying
computer system that supports the connection offered. The combination of
services - internal and external to an organization - make up a service-oriented
architecture.
While many developments have been made on web services, there are now
some efforts on securing web services. Access control and security assertion
languages are being developed that are based on XML (eXtensible Markup
Language). However current web services are not capable of understanding
the web pages and taking actions. Therefore, Tim Berners Lee developed the
notion of a semantic web that facilitates machine understandable web pages
[2]. There are now efforts on integrating web services with the semantic web
technologies to produce semantic web services. However these semantic web
services have to be secure.
In this chapter we provide an overview of secure web services, secure se-
mantic web and the application of secure semantic web technologies for secure
web services to develop secure semantic web services. The organization of this
chapter is as follows. Secure web services are discussed in section 2. Secure
