The enormous amount of XML data growing on the Web raises several security issues that current XML standards do not address. The most important security issue in such a distributed environment is the lack of efficient Access Control and authorization for XML data currently. In this paper, we propose a generalized Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model called An Intelligent Agent Based Temporal Action Status Access Control (IATASAC) model which uses temporal and action status constraints for efficient access control. This model addresses certain shortcomings of RBAC model by the use of semi structured data; hence it is more suitable for distributed web environment. Since the proposed model has been developed for XML data and needs smart decision, it heavily relies on XPath and intelligent agents for effective querying and answering. The Experimental results show that the proposed model performs well. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.