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Towards access control for collaborative modelling apps

Published: 26 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are small languages tailored to narrow domains. Their purpose is to cope with the needs of domain experts, who might not have a software engineering background. In previous work, we proposed the novel notion of Active DSLs, which are graphical DSLs extended to benefit from mobility using geolocation and interactions with external services and devices. Active DSLs are the central component of a mobile collaborative appl called DSL-comet.
Modelling using DSLs can be done collaboratively by a group of stakeholders, and the levels of required confidentiality and integrity may vary across modelling artefacts. While preventing the access to protected data has been tackled for DSLs used on static environments like laptops and desktop computers, it has not been envisioned for modelling on mobile devices. The latter poses further challenges as access permissions may depend not just on user profiles but also on conditions that only make sense in mobility, such as geolocation or information retrieved from nearby sensors.
Embracing the approach of Active DSLs, we propose an annotation meta-model to provide fine-grained role-based access control to any domain meta-model, hence enabling model element protection when collaborating in mobility. The paper describes our current implementation and our envisioned low-code solution, which includes a cloud-based textual editor to define role hierarchies and permissions for the domain meta-models.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MODELS '20: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: Companion Proceedings
October 2020
713 pages
ISBN:9781450381352
DOI:10.1145/3417990
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 October 2020

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Author Tags

  1. active DSLs
  2. collaborative modelling
  3. low-code engineering platforms
  4. mobile app
  5. mobile modelling
  6. role-based access control

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • R&D programme of Madrid
  • European Union
  • Marie Sklodowska Curie
  • Spanish Ministry of Science

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MODELS '20
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Overall Acceptance Rate 144 of 506 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Activity Provenance for Rights and Usage Control in Collaborative MR using Blockchain2023 20th Learning and Technology Conference (L&T)10.1109/LT58159.2023.10092326(26-31)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Low-Code Development Platforms: A Descriptive Study2022 17th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)10.23919/CISTI54924.2022.9820354(1-4)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Modelling in low-code development: a multi-vocal systematic reviewSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-021-00964-021:5(1959-1981)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2022
  • (2021)EOQ: An Open Source Interface for a More DAMMMMN Domain-specific Model Utilization2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00075(483-492)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2021)Cloud-based modeling in IoT domain: a survey, open challenges and opportunities2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00018(73-82)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2021)Modelling on mobile devicesSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-021-00897-8Online publication date: 29-Jun-2021

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