An Information Model and Architecture for Context-Aware Management Domains

Context-aware service platforms use context-aware policy management solutions to manage user's privacy preferences, to manage trust relationships, and to control access to the platform resources. However, existing context-aware policy management solutions focus on at most one policy management area (e.g. trust management, or privacy, or access control) and are difficult to integrate due to their unrelated policy/context information models and semantics. This leads to an integration problem, and to a policy management nightmare, because context-aware policies of different management areas have to be managed using different tools. In this paper, we address this problem using a new context-aware policy management abstraction called context-aware management domains (CAMDs). CAMDs allow the grouping of entities, for which a common set of policies apply, based on the entities' context. In comparison to existing solutions CAMDs provide a more generic context-aware policy management abstraction. CAMDs are suitable for any policy management area, and allow context-aware obligation policies, which are not supported by existing policy management solutions.