Self-describing delegation networks for the Web

As the necessity of flexible Web security becomes more apparent and as the notion of using policies for access control gains popularity, the number of policy languages being proposed for controlling access to Web resources increases. Instead of defining a single standard policy language, we believe that there should be a way of embracing different policy languages and of allowing interoperability between systems that use different policy languages. We propose Rein - a policy and delegation framework that is grounded in semantic Web technologies - to help the Web preserve maximum expressiveness for local policy communities by enabling global interoperability of policy reasoning. Rein provides ontologies for describing policy and delegation networks, and provides mechanisms for reasoning over them, both of which can be used to develop domain and policy language specific access control frameworks for Web resources. The focus of this paper is the delegation mechanisms of the Rein policy framework that support both delegation of authorization and trust. In this paper we give a brief overview of the Rein framework, describe its delegation mechanisms, and illustrate their usefulness through some examples