– This work empirically evaluates the effectiveness of the novel ontology-based access-control mechanism and the common password-protected access-control mechanism for social blogs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
– The ontology-based access-control scheme is designed to fit two characteristics of blog activities: social relationships and tags. A laboratory experiment is conducted to assess the perceived privacy benefit and perceived ease of use of the two mechanisms.
– Analytical results indicate that, with the ontology-based access-control scheme, users perceive more privacy benefit than with the password-protected access-control scheme. The perceived ease of use with the ontology-based and password-protected access-control systems did not differ significantly.
– Cross-boundary collaborations need an appropriate approach to control communication access. Further study is required to evaluate the ontology-based access-control scheme applied in cross-organizational and cross-departmental collaborations.
– From a knowledge management perspective, blogs can store personal and organizational knowledge and experiences. The ontology-based access-control scheme encourages knowledge sharing for appropriate persons.
– The new ontology-based access-control mechanism can help online users keep secrets from selected people to gain more privacy benefits than the existing password-protected access-control mechanism.
