Abstract
Policies are declarations of constraints on the behaviour of components within distributed systems, and are often used to capture norms within agent-based systems. A few machine-processable representations for policies have been proposed, but they tend to be either limited in the types of policies that can be expressed or limited by the complexity of associated reasoning mechanisms. In this paper, we argue for a language that sufficiently expresses the types of policies essential in practical systems, and which enables both policy-governed decision-making and policy analysis within the bounds of decidability. We then propose an OWL-based representation of policies that meets these criteria using and a reasoning mechanism that uses a novel combination of ontology consistency checking and query answering. In this way, agent-based systems can be developed that operate flexibly and effectively in policy-constrainted environments.
This research was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence and was accomplished under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author(s) and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Government, the U.K. Ministry of Defence or the U.K. Government. The U.S. and U.K. Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.
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Şensoy, M., Norman, T.J., Vasconcelos, W.W., Sycara, K. (2010). OWL-POLAR: Semantic Policies for Agent Reasoning. In: Patel-Schneider, P.F., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2010. ISWC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6496. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17746-0_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17746-0_43
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