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Internet Logic

Policy RuleML: A general assessor of adherence of a business situation to a pre-requisite expressed in logic

The project started in 2002, and is ongoing.

This system is generic; special cases of it appear in each of our other projects. The major effort will be to identify the key functions, relations and modalities needed to describe the intended business situation accurately enough for a correct assessment to be made. In the short term, existing inference systems will be tested for effectiveness and if necessary specialized inference rules and inference systems will be developed.

An initial prototype has been built using the j-DREW inference engine. This reasoning engine is small (35 Kilobytes compressed source code with comments) but uses powerful techniques from recent theorem-proving research.

We are also creating a Technical Committee within OASIS on Policy RuleML with Benjamin Grosof of the MIT Sloan School of Business, and Said Tabet.

In the longer term, deontic logic is being considered, since it is applicable for expressing permissions and obligations. We are also concerned about conclusions drawn non-monotonically from the lack of some condition. Clearly the web is dynamic so the assumption of complete knowledge is false. We are following advances in this area, including the very large literature on well-founded semantics, as well as recent work, such as on local closed world assumptions.

Our research results could have an impact on Web services delivery, and business policy on the Web.

Research opportunities related to this project: we are looking for research collaborations with researchers interested in deontic and modal logic, computational logic systems, web services.

Possible applications include: assessing permissions and access control for secure and private systems

Research Contact

Dr. Bruce Spencer
Group Leader
Internet Logic
NRC Institute for Information Technology
46 Dineen Drive
Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4
Telephone: +1 (506) 444-0384
E-mail: Bruce.Spencer@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Business Contact

Marc-Alain Mallet
Business Development Officer
Business Development Office, New Brunswick
NRC Institute for Information Technology
46 Dineen Drive
Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4
Telephone: +1 (506) 444-0394
Fax: +1 (506) 452-3859
E-mail: Marc-Alain.Mallet@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca