Uncle-Share: Annotation-Based Access Control for Cooperative and Social Systems

Shared workspaces and Web 2.0 platforms provide lots of services for sharing various objects. Most current shared workspaces and Web 2.0 platforms provide role-based, coarse-grained access control policies which undermine the utility of them in some cases. In this paper, we present Annotation-Based Access Control, an approach towards access control which benefits from user annotations to annotate people using various fixed and desired open vocabulary (tags) and helps to build a more flexible access control mechanism based on relationships among different types of users. We also present a prototype, a gadget called UncleShare, which we have developed to enable this access control mechanism and evaluate it.