Towards an Ontology-Driven Approach for the Interoperability Problem in Security Compliance

In today’s IT-centric, regulated and competitive environment, businesses rely more heavily on IT technologies. Organizations are often challenged by customers, business partners and legal entities to demonstrate their compliance to different IT security and performance standards. The existence of heterogeneous standards and regulations raises the interoperability problem for organizations having to deal with multiple standards. As the issue will grow in complexity, we propose an ontology-driven interoperability approach where the standards can be integrated through the process of ontology mapping between ontologies constructed to model the standards. Consistency, reusability, autonomy and support for intelligent reasoning are prime features of the ontological approach over existing manual custom-designed solutions. 1