Challenges and Potential Solutions for Secure and Efficient Knowledge Leveraging in Coalitions

Dynamic coalitions are often formed to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between different organizations that have to collaborate on the grounds of a common purpose (such as emergency incident responding). In such a versatile and dynamic environment-where participant domains may leave or join at any time- the ability to retrieve and disseminate knowledge efficiently and rapidly is a task of extreme significance. Secure management of resources on the other hand is a non-trivial process. In this paper, we present the main challenges in coalition management and provide a framework for efficient classification and retrieval of knowledge assets. We also describe a flexible security framework for coalition management, as well as an optimization effort based on soft constraints that allows the reduction of the system’s administrative overhead. Keywords: Coalitions, Security Policies, Soft Constraints. 1