Semantic Web Framework and Meta-Control Model to Enforce Context-Sensitive Policies

Enforcing rich policies in open environments will increasingly require the ability to dynamically identify external sources of information necessary to enforce different policies. In this paper, we introduce a semantic web framework and a meta-control model for dynamically interleaving policy reasoning and external service discovery and access. Within this framework, external sources of information are wrapped as web services with rich semantic profiles allowing for the dynamic discovery and comparison of relevant sources of information. Each entity relies on one or more software agents responsible for enforcing relevant privacy and security policies in response to incoming requests. These agents implement meta-control strategies to dynamically interleave semantic web reasoning, service discovery and access. This research has been conducted in the context of myCampus, a pervasive computing environment aimed at enhancing everyday campus life at Carnegie Mellon University though the proposed framework extends to a number of other environments (e.g. virtual enterprises, coalition forces, homeland security). Preliminary empirical results appear rather promising.