As a published standard specification, one of the goals of XACML is to promote common terminology and interoperability between access control implementations by multiple vendors. XACML is primarily an attribute-based access control system (ABAC), also known as a policy-based access control (PBAC) system, where attributes (bits of data) associated with a user or action or resource are inputs into the decision of whether a given user may access a given resource in a particular way. Role-based access control (RBAC) can also be implemented in XACML as a specialization of ABAC.