A Collaborative Space and Its Entities: The Importance of Roles and Relationship of Entities

In computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), role based access right (RBAC) is commonly accepted for controlling access to resources. Later, this role concept has been widely adopted into other CSCW research areas where it is known as role based management (RBM). However, RBM is studied within its limited scope without considering role in a bigger scale that covers various CSCW entities. Thus, complications occur when these separate entities try to work together. Most of the integrations are perform during execution time where users become the medium of integration by playing multiple roles. Such integration is burden to users. Therefore, this research proposes to use role as the center of management to integrate these separate entities. It is achieved through two objectives. First objective is to identify various entities that are managed by RBM in CSCW environment and second, is to discover the relationship between these entities. To achieve both objectives, various RBM are studies via content analysis to extract the important entities and to establish their relationships. Finally the finding is illustrated by Collaborative Space model where it exhibits the entities and their relationship. The model supports structured and comprehensive role-based management of CSCW.