Apart from the distinctive key features presented in the previous posts WApP also employs a set of features that are shared among all applications of the platform. These are the cross-applications features and this post aims to introduce the user management as one of them.
User profile information is a piece of information that should be shared across multiple applications in an applications platform. This way applications can know details about the user, their roles, the groups in which they belong and adjust appropriately their functionality or interface. In WApP this information about users is described using 3 grouping levels for a user, a set of common characteristics for all users and a relationship between groups or users and the sensors they can have access to as a measure to protect privacy of their information. The following paragraphs describe this structure in more detail.
Domains: Domains in the user management system is an entity that separates different organizations or groups at the broadest level. The Engineering Building in NUI Galway would be a domain of which all staff and students based their could have membership, however their level of access and engagement with WApP will be defined by their role or membership of
Roles: A Role is an entity that can be used to group users across different domains. For example, a number users may be identified in the role of managers and these could include managers from both the NUI Galway pilot site and from Linate pilot site. In the Waternomics application platform this allows for applications developed for one site to be easily targeted to groups in other pilot sites that have the same role.
Groups: Groups are more specific to a domain and allow the categorization of users within a domain. A user can exist in multiple groups and groups can also be connected with specific roles allowing the interconnection of groups in different domains based on the roles they have.
Users: Users is the final entity containing the information of a specific user with a username, password and all other properties that define a user in the management structure.
Sensor ownership: Given the description of Domains, Roles, Groups and Users the applications infrastructure also keeps information about which user has access to data of specific sensors to ensure privacy of data. A user can directly be connected as having ownership of a sensors thus being able to see its data but also they can be connected via a group that they belong to.
Using information from Domains, Roles, and Groups that a user belongs to, applications can adjust their functionality and interface accordingly to present more personalized information to each user. The sensor ownership relation connects the sensor entities from the dataspace with users so that privacy is ensured in terms of data being available to users. Moreover the user management structure also helps developer to target their applications to specific user groups based on their role, domain or group while at the same time enables sharing applications across multiple users easily.