Building and evaluating an ontology-based tool for reasoning about consent permission

Given the lack of mechanisms for specifying, sharing and checking the compliance of consent permissions, we focus on building and testing novel approaches to address this gap. In our previous work, we introduced a "permission ontology" to capture in a precise, machine-interpretable form informed consent permissions in research studies. Here we explain how we built and evaluated a framework for specifying subject's permissions and checking researcher's resource request in compliance with those permissions. The framework is proposed as an extension of an existing policy engine based on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), incorporating ontology-based reasoning. The framework is evaluated in the context of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center biorepository, modeling permissions from an informed consent and a HIPAA form. The resulting permission ontology and mechanisms to check subject's permission are implementation and institution independent, and therefore offer the potential to be reusable in other biorepositories and data warehouses.