Paper Style

When writing a paper for a conference, the style and preferred format of the conference should be investigated. Particularly interesting is how accepted papers have been written, their writing style, layout and amount of theory and such.

In this conference, different sessions are held depending on the submissions (I assume). But usually there are sessions for access control models, management and administration, distributed systems, implementations and some sort of merging with other technologies(for example, trust and identity management). In earlier conferences (pre 2002), there were no sessions and the papers were sometimes shorter. This year, papers are allowed to be up to 10 pages long, including everything. Majority of papers have 15 or less references. Last year's papers were all pushing the 9-10 page mark.

There aren't too many role engineering papers. I have found some RBAC papers outside of this conference but the majority of them are still here. This will probably be the same for role engineering papers. There was actually a session for role engineering in 2002 and 2003; it had 2 papers in each of the sessions.

The general layout is pretty standard: intro, background, methodology, testing, results and discussion, conclusion and future work. The discussions and methodologies are long while abstract, related work and conclusions are fairly short. The introductions do get very long though. I will have to make my background and introduction shorter for this paper I think. I think it is also okay if I shorten my conclusion as well, after reading some of the other papers. Most of the papers have quite short conclusions. I will be using the using sig-alternative style sheet. I think I picked it because it gives me just a little bit extra in the margins just in case I write too much.

Another thing that I've noticed in papers in this conference, they don't explain what RBAC is. I guess it's just expected everyone reading papers from this conference should know. It's a specialised access control conference. That's a good thing, because it means I don't have to explicitly explain the concepts of permissions, roles, assignments, users, hierarchy and where everything fits. It's more straight to the point which allows for the papers to be shorter.