Agent-Based Semantic Role Mining for Intelligent Access Control in Multi-Domain Collaborative Applications of Smart Cities

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 21; no. 13; p. 4253
• Main Authors: Ghazal, Rubina, Malik, Ahmad, Raza, Basit, Qadeer, Nauman, Qamar, Nafees, Bhatia, Sajal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 22.06.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Access control; Automation; Collaboration; Comparative analysis; Distributed processing; dynamic environments; intelligent RBAC; multi-domain collaboration; Ontology; Security management; semantic role mining; Semantics; Smart cities; smart city applications; Software
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s21134253

Significance and popularity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is inevitable; however, its application is highly challenging in multi-domain collaborative smart city environments. The reason is its limitations in adapting the dynamically changing information of users, tasks, access policies and resources in such applications. It also does not incorporate semantically meaningful business roles, which could have a diverse impact upon access decisions in such multi-domain collaborative business environments. We propose an Intelligent Role-based Access Control (I-RBAC) model that uses intelligent software agents for achieving intelligent access control in such highly dynamic multi-domain environments. The novelty of this model lies in using a core I-RBAC ontology that is developed using real-world semantic business roles as occupational roles provided by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), USA. It contains around 1400 business roles, from nearly all domains, along with their detailed task descriptions as well as hierarchical relationships among them. The semantic role mining process is performed through intelligent agents that use word embedding and a bidirectional LSTM deep neural network for automated population of organizational ontology from its unstructured text policy and, subsequently, matching this ontology with core I-RBAC ontology to extract unified business roles. The experimentation was performed on a large number of collaboration case scenarios of five multi-domain organizations and promising results were obtained regarding the accuracy of automatically derived RDF triples (Subject, Predicate, Object) from organizational text policies as well as the accuracy of extracted semantically meaningful roles.