On the Secure Sharing of Legacy Data

We describe a framework for the secure sharing and aggregation of legacy data. The framework, sif (for service-oriented interoperability framework), has two key principles at its core: that it should be possible to expose data from any legacy data source, irrespective of the underlying technologies or data models, and that data owners should be afforded the opportunity for expressive access control policies. sif abstracts issues such as secure transport and heterogeneous federation from application developers via a Java API. Our particular focus in this paper is sif´s plug-in mechanism, which gives rise to a simple and elegant means of facilitating interoperability.