Enhanced Sharing and Privacy in Collaborative Virtual Teams

Privacy concerns keep users from sharing required information in a collaborative environment. There is a need of privacy preserving methods that can enhance flow of information among collaborating users in dynamic teams without compromising their privacy. We describe a user-defined rolebased sharing control model and architecture that uses hybrid roles and hybrid sharing control policy for the owner of information as well as the enterprise. It extends the RBAC model to incorporate context constraints, collaborative relationships, and owner-defined roles. Sharing control request evaluation in presence of hybrid roles and hybrid policy is described. An architecture and its implementation using Web services is described that presents methods for sharing context information among collaborating users of the virtual team.