Supporting information access rights and visibility levels in virtual enterprises

In the Virtual Enterprise (VE) paradigm, enterprises must share and exchange a part of their internal local information in order to interact and cooperate with each other towards the achievement of the global VE goals. However, the information access level for every VE partner depends on several "determining features" such as the cooperation relationships, degree of trust, the function of the enterprise in the VE, and contractual/legal agreements, among other issues. Considering these aspects, every enterprise needs to precisely define the appropriate access rights and visibility levels on its information individually for every other VE partner. This paper focuses on the VE access rights definition mechanism designed and implemented within the Distributed Information Management System in the context of the ESPRIT project PRODNET II.