Conditions, constraints and contracts: on the use of annotations for policy modeling.

Abstract

Organisational policies express constraints on generation and processing of resources. However, application domains rely on transformation processes, which are in principle orthogonal to policy specifications and domain rules and policies may evolve in a non-synchronised way. In previous papers, we have proposed annotations as a flexible way to model aspects of some policy, and showed how they could be used to impose constraints on domain configurations, how to derive application conditions on transformations, and how to annotate complex patterns. We extend the approach by: allowing domain model elements to be annotated with collections of elements, which can be collectively applied to individual resources or collections thereof; proposing an original construction to solve the problem of annotations remaining orphan , when annotated resources are consumed; introducing a notion of contract, by which a policy imposes additional pre-conditions and post-conditions on rules for deriving new resources. We discuss a concrete case study of linguistic resources, annotated with information on the licenses under which they can be used. The annotation framework allows forms of reasoning such as identifying conflicts among licenses, enforcing the presence of licenses, or ruling out some modifications of a licence configuration