Security Policies for Sharing Knowledge in Virtual Communities

Knowledge management exploits the new opportuni-
ties of sharing knowledge among members of virtual communities
in distributed computer networks, and knowledge-management
systems are therefore modeled and designed as multiagent sys-
tems. In this paper, normative multiagent systems for secure
knowledge management based on access-control policies are
studied. It is shown how distributed access control is realized by
means of local policies of access-control systems for documents of
knowledge providers, and by means of global community policies
regulating these local policies. Moreover, it is shown how such a
virtual community of multiple knowledge providers respects the
autonomy of the knowledge providers