Use of Logic to describe Enhanced Communications Services

New functionality is added to telecommunications systems in the form of features or services. However, this is a very provider-centric approach, not giving much control to the user. We consider a logic that allows the user to express preferences as to how they wish calls to be handled. This logic is encapsulated in a user-friendly policy description language. The transferability of a policy description language (Ponder) developed for system management and access control is discussed

Ontology Stack for A Policy Wizard

An ontology provides a common vocabulary through which to share information in a particular area of knowledge, including the key terms, their semantic interconnections and certain rules of inference. The ACCENT policy-based management system uses a policy description language called APPEL and supports policy document formation through the use of a comprehensive user interface wizard. Through the use of OWL (the Web Ontology Language), the core aspects of APPEL have been captured and defined in an ontology. Assigned the acronym genpol, this ontology describes the policy language independent of any user interface or domain-specific policy information. A further ontology has been developed to define common interface features implemented by the policy wizard [17]. This ontology, referred to as wizpol, directly extends genpol. It provides additional information to the language itself, whilst retaining freedom from any domain-specific policy details. Combined, both genpol and wizpol act as a base for defining further domain-specific ontologies which may describe policy options tailored for a particular application. This report presents a technical overview of both the generic policy language ontology (genpol) and the wizard policy ontology (wizpol), expressed in the form of graphical depictions of OWL classes and properties

Policy-based management for body-sensor networks

Accepted versio

Using Event Calculus to Formalise Policy Specification and Analysis

As the interest in using policy-based approaches for systems management grows, it is becoming increasingly important to develop methods for performing analysis and refinement of policy specifications. Although this is an area that researchers have devoted some attention to, none of the proposed solutions address the issues of analysing specifications that combine authorisation and management policies; analysing policy specifications that contain constraints on the applicability of the policies; and performing a priori analysis of the specification that will both detect the presence of inconsistencies and explain the situations in which the conflict will occur. We present a method for transforming both policy and system behaviour specifications into a formal notation that is based on event calculus. Additionally it describes how this formalism can be used in conjunction with abductive reasoning techniques to perform a priori analysis of policy specifications for the various conflict types identified in the literature. Finally, it presents some initial thoughts on how this notation and analysis technique could be used to perform policy refinement

A Policy Architecture for Enhancing and Controlling Features

Abstract. Features provide extensions to a basic service, but in new systems users require much greater flexibility oriented towards their needs. Traditional features do not easily allow for this.We propose policies as the features of the future. Policies can be defined by the end-user, and allow for the use of rich context information when controlling calls. This paper introduces an architecture for policy definition and call control by policies. We discuss the operation of systems based on such an architecture. An important aspect of the architecture is integral feature interaction handling

Streamlining Policy Creation in Policy Frameworks

{\it Policy frameworks} provide a technique for improving reuse in program analysis: the same language frontend, and a core analysis semantics, can be shared among multiple analysis policies for the same language, while analysis domains (such as units of measurement) can be shared among frameworks for different languages. One limitation of policy frameworks is that, in practice, adding a new policy can still require a significant level of knowledge about the internals of the semantics definition. This abstract describes work on extending policy frameworks to solve this limitation, making policies reflective over their requirements and generating the policy semantics from a higher-level policy description language

Executable graphics for PBNM

The specification of a policy is performed in a policy language, usually following a textual representation. However, humans process images faster than text and they are prepared to process information presented in two or more dimensions: sometimes it is easier to explain things using figures and their graphical relations than writing textual representations. This paper describes a visual language, in the form of graphics that are executed in a networking environment, to define a network management policy. This approach allows to map visual tokens and corresponding arrangements into other languages to which a mapping is defined