Secure Semantic Web Application Development: Present and Future

Abstract

Semantic web is the future realization of the current web, in which resources are annotated with machine understandable meta-data, allowing the automation of tasks by employing these resources in their correct contexts. Several notable technologies have been specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the application development lifecycle of semantic web. The worldwide adoption of these technologies requires the development of secure semantic web applications. Therefore the research community has proposed to define and integrate security standards to all phases of semantic web application development. For this purpose the research community has reported some of the preliminary efforts in the form of XML Key Management (XKMS), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), XML Access Control Markup Language (XACML) and Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But there is a need to develop a security assessment benchmark for semantic web applications. The effective assessment of security of semantic web applications has been paid less attention so far in this regard. For this reason in this research work we propose some important features related to the development of a benchmark for secure semantic web application development that can effectively assess security of semantic web applications based on the survey of the security aspect of important semantic web languages i.e. XML, RDF, OWL and SPARQL/ SPARUL. The aim of the benchmark is to facilitate developers in building secure semantic web applications and provide security professionals to develop sophisticated security tools by effective performance evaluation.