On harnessing information models and ontologies for policy conflict analysis

We present a policy conflict analysis process that makes use of pre-defined semantic models of an application to perform effective and efficient conflict analysis. The process is effective as it can be used to analyse for policy conflicts that may occur in different applications due to the separation of application specific information and constraints from the algorithms to semantic models, such as information model and ontologies. The process is efficient as it incorporates a pre-analysis policy selection step that reduces the number of policies that need to be analysed more extensively. Experimental results show that this process results in a significant reduction in the number of policies that needed to be analysed for potential conflict and that it is flexible enough to detect for policy conflict both for many popular applications and between different applications.