Security and Authorization Issues in HL7 Electronic Health Records: A Semantic Web Services Based Approach

As Semantic Web services begin to emerge as the next evolution of the Service Oriented Architecture, it is become clear that authorization is going to be one of its biggest challenges. Not only are there the typical obstacles which most areas of Semantic Web services have had to overcome, i.e. what parts of a Web services need semantic information, how best to use the semantics, and agreeing on standards, but there are the fine grained security implications as well. For instance, how much authorization information is necessary to aid in Semantic Discovery of Web services? Is the authorization information opening any new security holes? It is the goal of this article to address these issues by providing a framework for expressing the proper authorization information in order to aid in the Semantic Discovery of Web services in which the requesting service most likely has the authority to invoke.