Policy Analysis Using a Hybrid Semantic Reasoning Engine

Abstract

Policies enable configuring services by declaratively specifying the (desired) behavior of these services in various, specific circumstances. Different policy languages allow the specification of policies in specific areas such as security, quality of service, functional user preferences, etc. Semantic Web technologies can be used to express the semantics of these policies and the domain they are applied to. In a large, distributed environment, the number of actual policies can quickly become substantial. Moreover, different stakeholders can each describe a set of policies. Such a set may interact with the policies of other actors. Therefore, reasoning about policies has become a necessity, for instance for detecting possible conflicts, inclusion, etc. Semantic Web technologies offer support for reasoning - but this support is insufficient. This paper presents an approach to support enhanced reasoning capabilities by combining the best of two worlds: a solution based on Semantic Web technologies on the one hand, and a general-purpose rule language on the other hand. We illustrate how such a hybrid reasoning system can improve policy management in complex distributed service platforms.