SB01: Personal Profiles.

A number of recent proposals exist for self-management of personal information and preferences on personal data release. The purpose of project SB01 is to investigate the possibility of users defining their own information dissemination policies, which are to be stored and enforced by server agents. A Java or a Java-Prolog implementation will need to be developed as part of the project work for SB01.

SB02: Access Control Policy Representation in SQL.

A key issue in computer science is to represent policy information in computer-based terms. A variety of access control models have been proposed for specifying policies. The purpose of project SB02 is to take a specific abstract model and to convert it into an SQL implementation. The SQL implementation will make use of query rewriting techniques that can be programmed using PostgreSQL. This project will require a good deal of technical knowledge on PostgreSQL's rewrite features and is only suitable for students with strong background in programming.

SB03: Business Rules.

In recent work on in computer-based policy representation and enforcement, the idea of meta-model representation for access controls has been proposed. SB03 addresses the key question of whether existing proposals for access control extend to business rules policies. An implementation will be developed of the unified model.

SB04: RuleML for Policy Exchange.

In order to engage in e-commerce, agents need to be able to exchange and process policy rules. Currently, a syntax for exchange has been developed (RuleML), but a need remains to extend the syntax to enable the requirements of much richer policies to be captured. The motivation for SB04 is to develop a rich policy model and to represent the model within RuleML. RuleML technologies must be used to implement a working system.

SB05: Administration of Rule-based Computer Systems.

Large organisations are increasingly requiring automated procedures expressed via rules. Administrators within an organisation are responsible for modifications to the policy rules. The usual assumption is that application-specific policy information is expressed using facts (together with small number of meta-policy rules). However, administration of rule-based policies is needed. SB05 is concerned with the question of how best to represent administrative models for rule-based policies. An implementation of an administrative system will need to be developed for rule-based policies.