Policy Creation for Enterprise-Level Data Sharing

Enterprises, including military, law enforcement, medical, financial, and commercial organizations, must often share large quantities of data, some potentially sensitive, with many other enterprises. A key issue, the mechanics of data sharing, involves how to precisely and unambiguously specify which data to share with which partner or group of partners. This issue can be addressed through a system of formal data sharing policy definitions and automated enforcement. Several challenges arise when specifying enterprise-level data sharing policies. A first challenge involves the scale and complexity of data types to be shared. An easily understood method is required to represent and visualize an enterprise’s data types and their relationships so that users can quickly, easily, and precisely specify which data types and relationships to share. A second challenge involves the scale and complexity of data sharing partners. Enterprises typically have many partners involved in different projects, and there are often complex hierarchies among groups of partners that must be considered and navigated to specify which partners or groups of partners to include in a data sharing policy. A third challenge is that defining policies formally, given the first two challenges of scale and complexity, requires complex, precise language, but these languages are difficult to use by non-specialists. More useable methods of policy specification are needed. Our approach was to develop a software wizard that walks users through a series of steps for defining a data sharing policy. A combination of innovative and well known methods is used to address these challenges of scale, complexity, and usability.