Supporting request acceptance with use policies

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of automating the contribution of resources owned by people to do work for others. This is by providing a means for owners of resources to maintain autonomy over how, when and to whom their resources are used with the specification of use policies governing resources. We give representations of requests for resource usage as a set of conditional norms and a use policy as specifying what norms should and should not be imposed on a resource (i.e. a set of meta-norms). Our main contribution is a reasoner built on the Event Calculus, that detects conflicts between requests and use policies, determining whether the request can be accepted.