Rolschemas

Rolschemas is a theoretical framework used to model the relationship between roles and data schemas within information systems. The term combines 'roles' with 'schemas' to describe how access rights, responsibilities, and structural data definitions interact across a system.

In a rolschema, roles are first-class elements that carry attribute sets, permissions, and constraints. Schema fragments describe data shapes, fields, and validation rules. The framework supports composition, inheritance, and mapping from roles to schema fragments to define who can access which data structures and under what conditions.

Rolschemas are intended as a modeling layer for governance, security, and data quality. They are distinct from general-purpose schema languages (such as JSON Schema or XML Schema) and from ontology languages; instead, they focus on the intersection of user or process roles with structural data definitions and constraints.

Example: in a human resources rolschema, roles might include HR_Admin, HR_Manager, and Employee. The HR_Admin role may be mapped to a schema fragment with read and write access to all personnel records, HR_Manager to most fields, and Employee to limited view of their own record. The model also encodes constraints, such as audit requirements and data masking for external reports.

Applications include access-control design, data governance, auditability, and multi-tenant systems where different tenants share a common data model but enforce tenant-specific access rules and schema variations.

Challenges include complexity of maintaining mappings, potential performance overhead for large schemas, and the need for interoperable tooling to serialize rolschemas across systems.

See also: access control, role-based access control, data governance.