Policies, which usually govern the behaviour of networking services (e.g., security, QoS, mobility, etc.) are becoming an increasingly popular approach for the dynamic regulation of web information systems. By appropriately managing policies, a system can be continuously adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. The adoption of a policy based approach for controlling a system requires an appropriate policy representation regarding both syntax and semantics, and the design and development of a policy management framework. In the context of the Web, the use of languages enriched with semantics has been limited primarily to represent Web content and services. However the capabilities of these languages, coupled with the availability of tools to manipulate them, make them well suited for many other kinds of applications, as policy representation and management. In this chapter, we present an evaluation of the ongoing efforts to use ontological (Semantic Web) languages to represent policies for distributed systems.
OWL-POLAR: A Framework for Semantic Policy Representation and Reasoning
