Access Permissions
Global permissions levels
In Telemeta there should basically be four levels of permissions:
- Public: read-only access, can browse, search and listen to a part of the content
- User: read-only access, can browse, search and listen to all content
- Maintainer: read-write access to the metadata, can upload/update audio files
- Administrator: in addition to the Maintainer permissions, can modify the application configuration and especially the super-metadata.
The super-metadata mostly consists into enumerations. Certain data fields may only take a value from a given list of values. For example, in the original Ethnomusicology 4D database the "ethnic group" is a such field. An external table lists the valid ethnic groups. For consistency, only the administrators should be allowed to modify this external tables. The maintainers would in turn be allowed to modify the metadata by selecting one of the values preset by the Administrator.
Content specific access permissions
The only difference between the User and the Public levels is that the later should only have access to those audio files and collections that are marked "public".
Questions
Is this simple permission system enough, or may there be users that have access to a part of the data, and other users to another part of the data ? User groups (sounds heavy IMO) ?
Same thing about maintainers: should there be maintainer groups, so that some maintainers can modify a part of the data, and some maintainers other parts ?
Should audio files and associated meta data have owners as in a UNIX file system ? (I hope not ;)
