A Semantic Policy Management Environment for End-Users and Its Empirical Study

Policy rules are often written in organizations by a team of people in different roles and technical backgrounds. While user-generated content and community-driven ontologies become common practices in the semantic environments, machine-processable user-generated policies have been underexplored, and tool support for such policy acquisition is practically non-existent. We defined the concept and developed a tool for policy acquisition from the end users, grounded on the Semantic technologies. We describe a policy management environment (PME) for the Semantic Web and show its added value compared to existing policy-related developments. In particular, we detail a part of the PME, the policy acquisition tool that enables non-expert users to create and modify semantic policy rules. An empirical study has been conducted with 10 users, who were new to the semantic policy acquisition concept and the developed tool. The main task for the users was to model policies of two different scenarios using previously unknown to them ontologies. Overall, the users modeled successfully policies employing the tool, with minor deviations between their performance and feedback. Observation-based, quantitative and qualitative feedback on the concept and the implementation of the end-user policy acquisition tool is presented.