Abstract

Slides available .

We advocate using deontic logic and its representation in the event calculus to control access to information in a distributed ubiquitous system. Contracts between information owners are encoded in terms of classes of organisations, data, and interactions. Fluents, events, and application-specific rules that link the two are then extracted from the contracts and mapped to the components, endpoints, and messages used to implement the system. The expression of organisations’ responsibilities is natural and leads to a simple mechanism of data flow monitoring. Some parts of the system can make forward progress while others are in conflict, meaning that resolution does not impede other processing. Furthermore, specification in terms of entities’ behaviour rather than explicit modelling of service level agreements (SLAs) means that it is straightforward to make decisions based on observations that are not specified in the SLA but that are noticed by a human.