Social Policy & Norm Awareness

Signs and signals in human society describe expected/optimal behavior Positive/negatives consequences of violating/fulfilling the policy Not always immediately enforceable - depends on type of policy and enforcement mechanism Users can weigh pros & cons and decide best course of action Technological Policy Awareness - how can we develop similar signals in information systems ?

Image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Image courtesy of Creative Commons

Technological Policy Awareness

Policy infrastructures that help both people and machines ‘play by the rules’ relevant to social interactions Consistent with the way legal rules work Able to capture and reason over security & privacy requirements (good ui) Provide useful explanations

Image courtesy of Adventure Quest http://www.battleon.com/

Some Technical Challenges

Usability Policy authoring Justifications and explanations seamless interaction with existing infrastructures Web-scale policy reasoning and integration Narrow domains such as Flickr as well as large-scale data integration Simple policy languages for web-scale systems as well as expressive languages for smaller systems Policy interoperability

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/sesh00/ Image courtesy of TimBL

More Information

• This presentation: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2008/Talks/1112-WSRICouncil-lk/
• W3C PLING: http://www.w3.org/Policy/pling/wiki/Main_Page
• DIG policy projects
  • Policy Aware Web project: http://www.policyawareweb.org/
  • Transparent Accountable Datamining Initiative: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI/