The SCAM Framework: Helping Semantic Web Applications to Store and Access Metadata

In this paper we discuss the design of the SCAM framework, which aims to simplify the storage and access of metadata for a variety of different applications that can be built on top of it. A basic design principle of SCAM is the aggregation of metadata into two kinds of sets of different granularity (SCAM records and SCAM contexts). These sets correspond to the typical access needs of an application with regard to metadata, and they constitute the foundation upon which access control is provided.