Towards fine grained RDF access control

The Semantic Web is envisioned as the future of the current web, where the information is enriched with machine understandable semantics. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". Among the various technologies that empower Semantic Web, the most significant ones are Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SPARQL, which facilitate data integration and a means to query respectively. Although Semantic Web is elegantly and effectively equipped for data sharing and integration via RDF, lack of efficient means to securely share data pose limitations in practice. In order to make data sharing and integration pragmatic for Semantic Web, we present a query language based secure data sharing mechanism. We extend SPARQL with a new query form called SANITIZE which comprises a set of sanitization operations that are used to sanitize or mask sensitive data within an RDF graph. The sanitization operations can be further leveraged towards RDF access control and anonymization, thus enabling secure sharing of RDF data.