Knowledge sharing in virtual enterprises via an ontology-based access control approach

A Model for Measuring the Impact of Organisational Factors on the Effectiveness of the Knowledge Sharing System

Knowledge Sharing (KS), as a serious part of promoting the organization’s success, is a process of swapping knowledge among families, people, and organizations. Therefore, this paper tries to study the impact of organisational factors on the effectiveness of the KS, via four important variables. We presented a project plan that contains four research hypotheses, with the effectiveness of the KS as a dependent construct. Data were collected by questionnaires. The size of the sample for structural equations has come to be 247 via the utilization of the sample measurement procedure. A case study was carried out in 247 employees of the East Azerbaijan Customs organizations in Iran include: Customs of Tabriz, Nurduz, Jolfa, Sahlan, and Maragheh. In our investigation, Smart PLS 2.0 has been utilised for the measurement assess. Besides, the structural equation modelling (SEM) procedure has been utilised for testing the validity and reliability of the supplied model’s measurement. The results showed that organisational culture is the most important factor in the effectiveness of KS. Furthermore, information technology (IT) acceptance, attitude towards KS, organisational climate, and attitude to KS play an important role in the effectiveness of the KS. As a general result, organization managers must implement KS in their organizations to improve organisational performance, reduce costs, enhance organisational innovation, and reduce repetitive work, through which international trade facilitates and helps the country’s economy. Also, the managers may arrange rules for the efficiency of rewards; moreover, they should maintain an open and conducive environment for new ideas and criticism. Managers of organizations should make the culture of teamwork pervasive through actions such as education of teamwork and identification benefits of working in teams. In this way, they can improve the attitude of staff to KS and information and reach behaviours accompanied by KS.

Fuzzy Role Based Access Control Design using Fuzzy Ontology

Fuzzy role-based access control (FRBAC) is essential for risk-based environments in many futuristic applications, even though role-based access control (RBAC) is the efficient and widely used access control model for enterprise applications. In FRBAC, authorization related information is vague. It brings the fuzziness in mapping among the components of FRBAC such as user, role and permission. Holding the fuzziness in FRBAC, it is challenging for the security engineer to verify the constraints and correctness of access control policy. On verifying the constraints and correctness of access control policy, knowledge representation techniques are much useful in practice. In this scenario, representing FRBAC using fuzzy ontology might be the right choice for semantic web application. The main objective of this article is to represent the access permissions of FRBAC using fuzzy ontology and verify whether the constraints of FRBAC are possible to get implemented in it or not.

The Consistency of Virtual Organizations Enabling Capabilities and Improvements in Knowledge Management Performance

The success of a virtual organization (VO) largely depends on the effective collaboration of its members in orchestrating their knowledge, skills, core competences and resources. It enables the VOs to enhance competitive capabilities and respond better to business opportunities. Most previous studies have focused on the influence of some contingent factors on Knowledge Management (KM) process/ outcome and neglect the interacting relationships among these contingent factors. The objective of this study is to explore the interacting patterns among a VO enabling capabilities from a covariation perspective on Knowledge Management Performance (KMP). The authors introduce the concept of “consistency” which helps them investigate the impact of the VO enabling capabilities on KMP. The results from a field survey of 95 Iranian IT/ engineering firms which implement KM processes show that the “consistency” among these enabling capabilities has a significant positive impact on KMP. The novel point in this paper is to consider the following factors in a virtual context simultaneously: focus on core competence, network cooperation, integration, trust in the network, and ICT usage. The results of this study have provided a very useful reference for scholars and managers to identify the relevant issues of KM projects in VOs.

Ontology-Based Knowledge Management for Enterprise Systems

Companies face the challenges of expanding their markets, improving products, services and processes, and exploiting intellectual capital in a dynamic network. Therefore, more companies are turning to an Enterprise System (ES). Knowledge management (KM) has also received considerable attention and is continuously gaining the interest of industry, enterprises, and academia. For ES, KM can provide support across the entire lifecycle, from selection and implementation to use. In addition, it is also recognised that an ontology is an appropriate methodology to accomplish a common consensus of communication, as well as to support a diversity of KM activities, such as knowledge repository, retrieval, sharing, and dissemination. This paper examines the role of ontology-based KM for ES (OKES) and investigates the possible integration of ontology-based KM and ES. The authors develop a taxonomy as a framework for understanding OKES research. In order to achieve the objective of this study, a systematic review of existing research was conducted. Based on a theoretical framework of the ES lifecycle, KM, KM for ES, ontology, and ontology-based KM, guided by the framework of study, a taxonomy for OKES is established.

Sharing and hiding online secrets

Purpose

This paper aims to manage access control tasks to satisfy the user privacy needs of online information resources according to social relations and tags.

Design/methodology/approach

The study proposes a method for access control management in the online social context. The proposed method includes the access control policy management process, metadata of access control policies, the data of ontologies, tags, and social relations, and conflict detection rules.

Findings

Online information sharing and hiding, which needs to consider social relations and mentioned topics, is a unique context and needs a novel access control mechanism. Ontologies are powerful and expressive enough to identify conflicts in access control policies. The paper provides a method using ontologies to control the access control activities based on social relations and tags on web content. The effectiveness of the method's conflict detection rules is validated through several scenarios.

Research limitations/implications

To make the proposed method suitable for widespread usage, further work is required to develop an access control policy specification and conflict detection tool. The proposed method introduces relatively novel usage scenarios, which consider social relationships, and tags compared with existing access control methods for online information sharing.

Practical implications

The proposed access control mechanism can be integrated into existing web sites. Online users can use this method to share information more easily than at present.

Originality/value

The method enables flexible access control in social contexts and handles unavoidable conflicts. It also opens the way to new access control scenarios in online social activities. The method can be used to keep secrets hidden from selected people.