Policy Technologies for Self-Managing Systems

Chapter 3 Policy Information Model

As was pointed out in Chapter 2, “Policy Lifecycle—Creation, Distribution, and Enforcement,” information models play an important role in the policy specification and transformation process. Casually speaking, a policy information model is an abstract description of the basic components of a policy and the relationship of policy components with one another. Although not every existing policy system has an explicit policy information model—in fact most policy systems do not have explicit information models—it is safe to say that the designers of a policy system had a certain information model implicit in their minds when they built the system. Clearly articulating the underlying policy information model helps ...