The Various Definitions of “Role”
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately on RBAC, specifically the technology-independent processes required to engineer and administer roles. As such, I was interested in a newsletter (not yet available online) by Dave Kearns pointing to a new RBAC glossary developed by the Modini-IDM Project in the EU. Here is their definition of a “role”:
A role is a set of one or more authorisations related to a specific application or service.
I find this definition very interesting, since it echoes the operating definition we in Novell Consulting have been using for roles:
A set of permissions used to fulfill all or part of a job function.