Role Based Access Control for social network sites

Social network sites are very popular and draw a number of users' attention in the time of Web 2.0. In this paper, we emphasize the access control research about social network sites from the perspective that roles imply patterns of relationships. We analyze the access control requirement of social network site, and introduce the role into it. Most important of all is that we propose the role base access control model for social network sites and define it with formal description. In the end, we build a social network site called SCHOLAT that targets toward specific groups who are scholars. We implement SCHOLAT and give the steps of resource request-reply procedure.