ESciDoc Transfer Ownership

Resources

• for Items
• for Containers
• for Contexts

Definitions

• Owner of a resource in eSciDoc is a user who has created the resource (the depositor of the resource) i.e. property: created-by
• Transferring of the ownership would mean that another user is from the moment of transferring owner of the resource

Current status

• Item/Container resources are versioned
• there is no distinction between created-by on resource level and created-by on version level
• only last-modified by on version level is kept for each version

• Context resource is not versioned
• there is only distinction between created-by

Approaches for Items/Containers

Modify created-by for all versions of the resource (Discarded)

• this has to be done by special core method
• the information on who had been previous owner is lost
  • an entry in the version history shall be made with event-type (transfer ownership) and information on the old user
  • new user becomes automatically "created-by" of the resource
• rights and privileges related to the owner automaticaly are transferred to the new owner
• simpler, smaller revision needed

Modify created-by for last version of the resource only (Discarded)

• core service has to introduce created-by for versions as well
• in this case, created-by for resource will be equal to created-by for versions starting with the version in which the resource was at the time of ownership transfer
• rights and privileges related to the owner are always checked by created-by on the resource level (not on the version)
• complex, huge revision needed

Use new property owned-by for all versions of the resource (discarded)

• if no owner is set, object is owned by creator
• owner of an object is not stored in fedora, but in separate database-table (as lock-owner)
• new core-methods to set and change an owner (for all versions!)
• additional filters to filter objects for owner
• possibility to create policies that are dependent on owner of an object

Rename property "created-by" to "owned-by" to have clear semantics

• the "created-by" property will be renamed to "owner" property (to have clear semantics)
• each Item/Container resource version has already last-modified-by property (which actually gives information which user created that particular version of a resource )
• new "owned-by" value will be delivered in the presentation of all versions of the resource
• XACML policies will be modified to reference "owned-by" instead of "created-by" property

Future use case: Deposit-on-behalf-on

• would require separate service (e.g. SWORD Server API) and separate role (e.g. user A grants deposit-on-behalf rights to user B for som/all of his contexts)

Approaches for Contexts

• Context related roles are:
  • Context Administrator
  • Context Modifier

• one possible approach is to do nothing, but assume that the user who needs to do something on the context has Context Modifier role
• another approach is to transfer the ownership to another user who has context administrator role
• note: Roles are extended on the referenced pages

Enhanced Scientific Documentation

eXtensible Access Control Markup Language

Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit

Application Programming Interface