Policy Derived Access Rights in the Social Cloud

Social clouds are a relatively new paradigm that allow users of an underlying social network to share their resources with their "friends", using previously established relationships. However, this sharing has a number of issues, including granularity of friendships, resource costs and maintenance. In this paper we argue that sharing decisions should be based on relationship information augmented by supplementary metadata derived from multiple sources. Users should be able to leverage the information available on their non-uniform friend relationships when making decisions, allowing them to confidently share their resources with those that would normally be outside of their immediate social circle. We introduce Graft, our Generalised Recommendation Architecture, that provides us with a mechanism to support this new approach.