A decentralized approach for controlled sharing of resources in virtual communities

A Virtual Community is a composition of heterogeneous and independently designed subsystems, focusing on large-scale resource sharing. One of the key aspects of virtual community management, is how to enforce a controlled and selective sharing of resources in such a dynamic and decentralized environment. The traditional way is to have all the access requests mediated by a trusted third-party. However, this approach has the drawback that the third party can become a bottleneck for the whole system. By contrast, in this paper we propose a decentralized approach to virtual community management that relies on a controlled sharing of rights and duties among community members. In the paper, besides dealing with community policy specification we provide a framework able to manage all the phases of the community life. © 2004 by International Federation for Information Processing.