Team-and-Role-Based Organizational Context and Access Control for Cooperative Hypermedia Environments

Access control needs to be more flexible and fine-grained to support cooperative tasks and processes performed by dynamic teams. This can be done by applying state-of-theart role-based access control (RBAC) technology. This paper examines how to integrate RBAC in a team-based organization context and how to apply such access control to hypermedia structures. Based on the analysis of these issues, a team-and-role-based access control model is proposed, which describes various aspects of role-based access control in cooperative hypermedia environments. The model has been implemented in CHIPS, a cooperative hypermedia-based process support system. Application examples demonstrate that its organizational context management and access permission authorization retain the simplicity of RBAC. Our extensions provide effective and flexible access control for managing various kinds of shared workspaces, especially shared process spaces, where access control is not only used for managing security, but also for supporting coordination.