Some issues of role-based collaboration

Roles are a powerful concept for facilitating distributed systems management. It has been accepted as a good solution for information sharing based on the research of KB AC (role-based access control). Although no explicit roles are declared in traditional CSCW (computer-supported-cooperative work) systems, there are implicit roles granted in the design. Consequently, we may infer that "without roles, there would be no collaboration". There is, however, a lack of specific, comprehensive research on building collaborative systems with role management and on role-based methods that have been successfully used in access control. This paper aims to clarify the basic problems related to the research of role-based collaboration and to propose a basic method to do that research.