Major Description
Today there is no way to properly identity, protect and secure (read and write access) additional meta information associated with a given Node.
With the current state of the JCR API and the implementation present in Oak the only kind of 'meta' is achieved by built-in functionality that consequently is able to mark special items protected, which comes with 2 drawbacks:
- read access to protected items is in accordance with the specification handled in the same way than regular non-protected items
- applications cannot write protected items through the JCR API which leaves these items ultimately 'system-maintained'. This is not particularly suitable for application driven meta-data that nevertheless should be identifiable and properly secured as such without having to come up with overly complex workaround nor access control setup.
Introducing the concept of meta-information in a more generic way would provide us (and the application developers using Oak) with easier ways to mark data that are different from the default content (thinking of an image, a title, a text) and offer built-in support for properly secure them (both read and write access).