SMWCon Fall 2013/Role-based Access Control in SMW

When employing wikis in small as well as big enterprises, the question about access control arises naturally. Especially in case where specific wiki pages -- or specific property values -- contain sensitive information and should only be readible or editable by a certain user group, different roles need be introduced. For instance, there are several groups focusing on different technologies. While each group should only be able to read and edit wiki pages of their responsibility, the department manager should be able to read and write any wiki page, in addition to some only exclusive pages regarding the assessment of technologies. Based on a concrete use case, this talk will present a state-of-the-art overview of existing extensions of MediaWiki regarding access control on page level and property level. Since an adequate access control mechanism is often not available, the way of proceeding and requirements for the development of such an access control mechanism in a typical industrial setting will be shown.