Towards Security in DAML

The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) is a project that promotes the vision of the Semantic Web, that is, the future Internet in which machine-processable metadata describes the meaning of web resources. DAML+OIL is a markup language developed in this effort. It allows the annotation of web pages to indicate their meaning. Languages like DAML+OIL are at the core of the Semantic Web. Semantic annotations will enable software agents to extract web content more quickly than it is possible with current techniques. Given that security plays an increasingly important role in today's society, it will also be vital to the success of the Semantic Web. We propose a security ontology for DAML+OIL that is the basis for handling access control restrictions and data integrity measures of web resources. We also provide hooks into the existing standard of XML Signatures. We show how security annotations can be applied to the specification of web services in DAML-S. Finally, we provide a wrapper for the Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) Protocol. SAML is currently under development to become a standard for XML-based security frameworks.