title: The linked medical data access control framework.
abstract: The integration of medical data coming from multiple sources is important in clinical research. Amongst others, it enables the discovery of appropriate subjects in patient-oriented research and the identification of innovative results in epidemiological studies. At the same time, the integration of medical data faces significant ethical and legal challenges that impose access constraints. Some of these issues can be addressed by making available aggregated instead of raw record-level data. In many cases however, there is still a need for controlling access even to the resulting aggregated data, e.g., due to data provider's policies. In this paper we present the Linked Medical Data Access Control (LiMDAC) framework that capitalizes on Linked Data technologies to enable controlling access to medical data across distributed sources with diverse access constraints. The LiMDAC framework consists of three Linked Data models, namely the LiMDAC metadata model, the LiMDAC user profile model, and the LiMDAC access policy model. It also includes an architecture that exploits these models. Based on the framework, a proof-of-concept platform is developed and its performance and functionality are evaluated by employing two usage scenarios.
authors.affiliation: Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research & Technology - Hellas, 6th km Xarilaou - Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece; University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece. Electronic address: ekamater@uom.gr.
authors.forename: Eleni
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kamateri
authors.affiliation: Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research & Technology - Hellas, 6th km Xarilaou - Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece; University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece. Electronic address: ekal@uom.gr.
authors.forename: Evangelos
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kalampokis
authors.affiliation: Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research & Technology - Hellas, 6th km Xarilaou - Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece; University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece. Electronic address: tambouris@uom.gr.
authors.forename: Efthimios
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Tambouris
authors.affiliation: Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research & Technology - Hellas, 6th km Xarilaou - Thermi, 57001 Thessaloniki, Greece; University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece. Electronic address: kat@uom.gr.
authors.forename: Konstantinos
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tarabanis
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D008498:Medical Record Linkage
keywords: Access policy; Data-cubes; Linked data; Medical data; Privacy; RDF