Rei : A Policy Language for the Me-Centric Project

Policies guide the way entities within a domain act, by providing rules for their behavior. Most of the research in policies is within a certain application area, for example security for databases, and there are no general specifications for policies. Another problem with policies is that they require domain dependent information, forcing researchers to create policy languages that are bound to the domains for which they were developed. This prevents policy languages from being flexible and being usable across domains. This report describes the specifications of the Rei policy language, which provides constructs based on deontic concepts. These constructs are extremely flexible and allow different kinds of policies to be stated. This simple policy language is not tied to any specific application and allows domain dependent information to be added without any modification. The policy engine associated with Rei accepts policies in first order logic and RDF. The report also discusses the functionality of the policy engine that interprets and reasons over Rei policies.