New Developments in Ontology-Based Policy Management: Increasing the Practicality and Comprehensiveness of KAoS

Abstract

The KAoS policy management framework pioneered the use of semantically-rich ontological representation and reasoning to specify, analyze, deconflict, and enforce policies [9, 10]. The framework has continued to evolve over the last five years, inspired by both technological advances and the practical needs of its varied applications. In this paper, we describe how these applications have motivated the partitioning of components into a well-defined three-layer policy management architecture that hides ontology complexity from the human user and from the policy-governed system. The power of semantic reasoning is embedded in the middle layer of the architecture where it can provide the most benefit. We also describe how the policy semantics of the core KAoS policy ontology has grown in its comprehensiveness. The flexible and mature architecture of KAoS enables straightforward integration with a variety of deployment platforms, ranging from highly distributed systems, such as the AFRL information management system, to human-robotic interaction, to dynamic management of quality-of-service and cross-domain information management of wireless networks in resource-constrained or security-sensitive environments.