Systematic literature review of virtual role

The concept of `virtual role' is used in scientific literature in various ways when focusing on role management. The term often also appears in work which deals with access control and virtual organizations. However, a common definition for the term is missing and no consistent definition work has been done. This paper presents a summary of a systematic literature review that has been done to clarify the term virtual role. From all available material, a number of 27 studies were selected for the review. Important phases of our research included database searches for relevant research material, data extraction from selected studies, quality assessment of the research material and a summarization of the concept. We found 4 subclasses in which the selected studies can be grouped. Our study presents a summarization of the virtual role concept and describes different aspects on how it is used in different contexts related to access control and role management systems. The literature reveals gaps for future research and we argue that the perspectives of this study could offer important additional insights to information system design using virtual role.