A semantic policy sharing and adaptation infrastructure for pervasive communities

Rule based information processing has traditionally been vital in many aspects of business, process manufacturing and information science. The need for rules gets even more magnified when limitations of ontology development in OWL are taken into account. In conjunction, the potent combination of ontology and rule based applications could be the future of information processing and knowledge representation on the web. However, semantic rules tend to be very dependent on multitudes of parameters and context data making it less flexible for use in applications where users could benefit from each other by socially sharing intelligence in the form of policies. This work aims to address this issue arising in rule based semantic applications in the use cases of smart home communities and privacy aware m-commerce setting for mobile users. In this paper, we propose a semantic policy sharing and adaptation infrastructure that enables a semantic rule created in one set of environmental, physical and contextual settings to be adapted for use in a situation when those settings/parameters/context variables change. The focus will mainly be on behavioural policies in the smart home use case and privacy enforcing and data filtering policies in the m-commerce scenario. Finally, we look into the possibility of making this solution application independent so that the benefits of such a policy adaptation infrastructure could be exploited in other application settings as well.