Towards Integration of XML Document Access and Version Control

Due to an increasing popularity of employing XML documents in various application domains, there arises a demand for an efficient XML document database management. Thus, development of effective mechanisms for manipulating access and version control has become a major research area. However, well-developed access and version control mechanisms alone do not suffice because they are closely interrelated. An update to a document (resulting in a new version of that document) may have a side effect to its associated access control policy, and vice versa. Thus, different document versions can be assigned different access authorizations. This paper gives an insight into the problems of access and version control of XML documents and proposes an approach to overcoming them by integrating these two essential mechanisms into a single framework. It employs RDF as a unified representation of access control policies and version information, and formalizes their interrelationships by means of RDF Declarative Description Theory.