Usable Policy Template Authoring for Iterative Policy Refinement

Policies can be used to customize a wide range of system behavior. People must have usable tools in order to author and maintain high-quality policies. In this paper, the authors discuss policy templates as a mechanism for assisting people in policy authoring and as a means for connecting policy elements to system entities. They believe that policy templates can be leveraged to make policy authoring more usable and to provide consistent policy authoring interfaces across a wide variety of policy types. Templates give users a structured format for creating policies which capture their intentions; however, a general approach for the creation of policy templates or for associating policy elements with the system implementation has not been described in published research to date.