In our selection of a suitable information security standard
we have defined two requirements: 1) the chosen standard must
aim to be comprehensive and have a wide scope on information
security and 2) the chosen standard should have – even if very
limited – a representative character for actual security practice.
After considering different standards we chose ISO 27001 [10]
for the following reasons: The ISO 27002 standard is the actual
guideline on best-practice in information security management.
However, as with best practice frameworks in the related field
of IT governance, individual controls can be ignored in an
attempt to customize the guideline to the actual organizational
needs – and in fact this is the common case [13]. By choosing
the certification standard ISO 27001 instead, we assume that
organizations having completed the certification process
accordingly have addressed all concepts incorporated in said
standard. Therefore, the chosen standard represents actual
security practice in organizations that are certified based on its
specifications. In the next section we will discuss information
security ontologies, which served as a reference to evaluate our
derived metamodel regarding completeness and in general are
often used synonymous to metamodels.