First International Workshop on
Secure Semantic Web  (SSW’08)

in conjunction with
the 24th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'08)
April 7-12, 2008, Cancun, México
http://www.icde2008.org/
General information

Today data is becoming one of the most critical resource in many organizations. The relevant role data are playing in each  businesses requires to devise efficient and secure mechanism for managing them.
On one hand efficient strategy for accessing  and sharing the data, extracting information from the data, and making use  of this information has become a real need. The advent of the Web has resulted in even greater demand for managing data, information and knowledge effectively. This is due to the fact that nowadays   data on the Web represents  the largest body of information ever accessible to any individual. However,  such data  are not machine-understandable,  and due to the volume of information the Web contains it is not possible to manage them manually. A promising solution  is that of using metadata to describe the data contained on the Web and this concept has evolved into the Semantic Web. A semantic Web can be thought of as a Web that is highly intelligent and sophisticated and once needs little or no human intervention to carry out tasks such as scheduling appointments, coordinating activities, searching for complex documents as well as integrating disparate databases and information systems. Recently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has specified several standards for the semantic Web, organized into different layers (i.e., the semantic Web layers cake). These standards include  XML and XML Schema for representing the data, RDF and RDF Schema for describing the data by means of vocabularies, and OWL a a language for defining and instantiating Web ontologies.
On the other hand,  information security   is one of the main assets of each organization, from the smallest companies to  international corporations. To have an idea of its key role in decision making processes, let us consider the e-business world.
Today a company willing to move its business to e-commerce has, as primary requirement, to provide a secure system. Indeed, no matters whether your are the best in your business or how cheapest are your prices, today e-commerce customers do not  take into account only the quality of services,  rather they want to be assured also about company's behaviour wrt security requirements.
As the Web evolves into the Semantic Web, there are more and more possibilities for security breaches as we introduce new technologies. Therefore, it is critical that security is considered right from the beginning  of expansion of the Semantic Web. For the semantic Web to be secure we need to ensure that all of the layers of the Semantic Web are secure. This includes secure XML,  secure RDF, secure ontologies, and ensure the secure interoperation of all  these technologies.

Security research for the Semantic Web is just at the beginning. This workshop aims to provide a forum where  novel research results in security in semantic Web can be presented
.

Workshop organizers

Bhavani Thuraisingham
University of Texas at Dallas
Email: bhavani.thuraisingham@utdallas.edu

Barbara Carminati
University of Insubria, Italy
Email: barbara.carminati@uninsubria.it