A Self-Policing Policy Language

Formal policies allow the non-ambiguous definition of situations in which usage of certain entities are allowed, and enable the automatic evaluation whether a situation is compliant. This is useful for example in applications using data provided via standardized interfaces. The low technical barriers of integrating such data sources is in contrast to the manual evaluation of natural language policies as they currently exist. Usage situations can themselves be regulated by policies, which can be restricted by the policy of a used entity. Consider for example the Google Maps API, which requires that applications using the API must be available without a fee, i.e. the application's policy must not require a payment. In this paper we present a policy language that can express such constraints on other policies, i.e. a self-policing policy language. We validate our approach by realizing a use case scenario, using a policy engine developed for our language.