Representing Web Service Policies in OWL-DL

Abstract

Recently, there have been a number of proposals for languages for expressing web service constraints and capabilities, with WS-Policy and WSPL leading the way. The proposed languages, although relatively inexpressive, suffer from a lack of formal semantics. In this paper, we provide a mapping of WS-Policy to the description logic fragment species of the Web Ontology Language (OWL-DL), and describe how standard OWL-DL reasoners can be used to check policy conformance and perform an array of policy analysis tasks. OWL-DL is much more expressive than WS-Policy and thus provides a framework for exploring richer policy languages.

A Platform Independent Access Control Metamodel for Web Services

“…Although there are directions to extend SWS standards with WS-Policy concepts [17,27,28], these solutions focus on service discovery and policy matching, and do not resolve the issues related to modeling and implementation.…”

A Formal Investigation of Semantic Interoperability of HCLS Systems

“…Most of the solutions to this problem are using ad hoc implementations or algorithm that are not explicitly tackled by the underlying formalism. Of course, it is possible to use existing languages-such as RDF and OWL as in (Kolovski, Parsia, Katz, & Hendler, 2005)-to represent policies but OWL cannot formally distinguish between ontological axioms and policy axioms. This is true for most of the formalisms presented here.…”

An Architecture for Verification of Access Control Policies with Multi Agent System Ontologies

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