The Role Analysis and Transitions in a Collaborative System

Roles provide a very natural and powerful way for an enterprise administrator or security officer to describe the privileges of various job functions. Roles are also a powerful and policy neutral concept for facilitating distributed systems management and enforcing information sharing. Role-based methods are very useful in building collaborative systems. This paper explains why role concepts in designing a collaborative tool are important, focuses on a discussion of the basic concepts required in a role-based design, the role assignment, management and transition in the system. It analyzes the roles and role transitions in a collaborative system. It also emphasizes the values of roles in the system analysis, design and implementation. In the last section, it concludes that a role-based method can help greatly to design and implement collaborative systems and still needs more comprehensive research. Index Terms—Role, role analysis, role transitions, collaborative systems