KAoS Policy Management for Semantic Web Services

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.Despite rapid advances in Web Services, the user community as demanding requirements continue to outstrip available technology solutions. To help close this gap, Semantic Web Services advocates are defining and implementing many new and significant capabilities (www.swsi.org). These new capabilities should more fully harness Web Services' power through explicit representations of Web resources' underlying semantics and the development of an intelligent Web infrastructure that can fully exploit them. Semantic Web languages, such as OWL, extend RDF to let users specify ontologies comprising taxonomies of classes and inference rules. Both people and software agents can effectively use Semantic Web Services. Agents will increasingly use the combination of semantic markup languages and Semantic Web Services to understand and autonomously manipulate Web content in significant ways. Agents will discover, communicate, and cooperate with other agents and services and - as we'll describe - will rely on policy-based management and control mechanisms to ensure respect for human-imposed constraints on agent interaction. Policy-based controls of Semantic Web Services can also help govern interaction with traditional (nonagent) clients. In the mid 1990s, we began to define the initial version of KAoS, a set of platform-independent services that let people define policies ensuring adequate predictability and controllability of both agents and traditional distributed systems. With various research partners, we' re also developing and evaluating a generic model of human-agent teamwork that includes policies to assure natural and effective interaction in mixed teams of people and agents - both software and robotic. We're exploiting the power of Semantic Web representations to address some of the challenges currently limiting Semantic Web Services' widespread deployment

Policy and Contract Management for Semantic Web Services

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.This paper summarizes our efforts to develop capabilities for policy and contract management for Semantic Web Services applications. KAoS services and tools allow for the specification, management, analyzes, disclosure and enforcement of policies represented in OWL. We discuss three current Semantic Web Services applications as examples of the kinds of roles that a policy management framework can play: as an authorization service in grid computing environments, as a distributed policy specification and enforcement capability for a semantic matchmaker, and as a verification tool for services composition and contract management

OWL-POLAR : A Framework for Semantic Policy Representation and Reasoning

Peer reviewedPreprin

Provenance-based validation of E-science experiments

E-Science experiments typically involve many distributed services maintained by different organisations. After an experiment has been executed, it is useful for a scientist to verify that the execution was performed correctly or is compatible with some existing experimental criteria or standards. Scientists may also want to review and verify experiments performed by their colleagues. There are no existing frameworks for validating such experiments in today's e-Science systems. Users therefore have to rely on error checking performed by the services, or adopt other ad hoc methods. This paper introduces a platform-independent framework for validating workflow executions. The validation relies on reasoning over the documented provenance of experiment results and semantic descriptions of services advertised in a registry. This validation process ensures experiments are performed correctly, and thus results generated are meaningful. The framework is tested in a bioinformatics application that performs protein compressibility analysis

OWL-POLAR : semantic policies for agent reasoning

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comPostprin

Managing semantic Grid metadata in S-OGSA

Grid resources such as data, services, and equipment, are increasingly being annotated with descriptive metadata that facilitates their discovery and their use in the context of Virtual Organizations (VO). Making such growing body of metadata explicit and available to Grid services is key to the success of the VO paradigm. In this paper we present a model and management architecture for Semantic Bindings, i.e., firstclass Grid entities that encapsulate metadata on the Grid and make it available through predictable access patterns. The model is at the core of the S-OGSA reference architecture for the Semantic Grid

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

Web Rule Languages to Carry Policies

Recent efforts in the area of Web policy languages show concerns on how to better represent both context and rules of a domain to deal with large number of resources and users. Interaction between domains with different business rules is also another questionable issue in this same area. Web rule languages have been recently introduced as a means to facilitate interaction between parties with dissimilar policies and business rules. Efforts have been placed to further review the possibility of the proposed solutions and extend them to work with other Web technologies. In this paper, we introduce REWERSE Rule Markup Language (R2ML) as a Web rule language that can be employed to make concepts, policies, and elements of a domain digestible by another domain through the use of vocabularies, rules, and annotations. We also show how R2ML elements can model the concepts and elements of different policy languages and assist systems with diverse policies with their interactions. 1

Goal sketching: towards agile requirements engineering

This paper describes a technique that can be used as part of a simple and practical agile method for requirements engineering. The technique can be used together with Agile Programming to develop software in internet time. We illustrate the technique and introduce lazy refinement, responsibility composition and context sketching. Goal sketching has been used in a number of real-world development projects, one of which is described here