Facilitating Access Control at Groupwork by Means of an Ontology of Its Organizational Structure and Concept of Stage

In the groupware applications one of the principal aims is to supply a common context, so the more information gets shared, the more easily common context can be achieved. However, the sharing of information in this type of applications leads to provide security mechanisms. Controlling the access to resources and activities is a key element in system security. In this paper, we focus in access control mechanism for security management. For this reason, firstly, we use a methodology to model the policy-based groupwork organizational structure management, which enables at system uses concepts to describe organization of the groupwork. The policy establishes the access control to the shared resources, since defines an organizational structure by means of the roles that users can play. Secondly, we consider that groupware applications contain several stages, for example, a conference management system has stages: submission, assignment, review, and acceptance of papers. At each stage role or roles that can participate are defined, in this way, we control access to shared workspace. Finally, we present an example to show as the methodology and concept of stages that we have used facilitate the access control in the groupware applications.