Towards Information Sharing in Virtual Organisations

Revolutionary innovation in information technology today has encouraged contribution from different areas to tackle large-scale scientific problems. This demands extensive sharing of information among collaborating organisations, which consequently requires a mechanism to control access and usage of the shared information. However, traditional access control systems lack persistent control available after information has been distributed, and hinder information sharing to some extent due to their limited granularity. This project investigates and presents a new way of protecting information using an icon-based information labelling scheme represented in a set of icons which aims to sustain different levels of protection within the shared information. This novel information control model is demonstrated with Microsoft Office Word 2007 and is believed to lay a good foundation for future work in the area of information security and control policy enforcement in dynamic virtual organisations.