A geotemporal role-based authorisation system

Geospatial databases include any data with reference to geocoordinate information. The geospatial data can either be digital raster images that represent the data on the earth in the form of pixels or digital vector data that is primarily from satellites. Due to the fact that many of the high-resolution satellites are commercial in nature, uncontrolled dissemination of the high resolution imagery may cause severe threats to national security as well as personal privacy. The severity of the threats is even more significant when this information is combined with vector maps or other publicly available vector data. In this paper, we present a GeoSpatial Authorisation System (GSAS), which is based on a GeoSpatial Authorisation Model (GSAM), for specifying and enforcing access control policies that makes reference to the spatial regions and locational credentials. The specification of authorisations is based on the spatial and temporal attributes associated with the image data, resolution of the images, geospatial credentials associated with users and privilege modes including view, zoom-in, overlay, view-thumbnail, view-annotation, identify, animate and fly-by that are relevant for geospatial image data. We present the GSAS system and its functionalities.