]> In order to realize the full potential of the World Wide Web as an open, dynamic, and distributed ``universe of network-accessible information'', it is important for web entities to behave appropriately. Policy management provides the openness, flexibility, and autonomy required to regulate this environment as entities can reason over their own policies and the policies of other entities to decide how to behave. Using policies also allows entities to specify expected behavior of entities they interact with. Entities can also adapt to increasingly complex requirements without the need for substantial changes to the structure or implementation through the use of policies.

Policy management includes policy specification, deployment, reasoning over policies, updating and maintaining policies, and enforcement. We propose that policy management is required for the web for (i) constraining different kinds of behavior including security, privacy, conversation, and collaboration, (ii) configuration management, (iii) describing business processes, and (iv) establishing trust and reputation.]]> 2005-05-10T00:00:00-05:00 2005-05-10T00:00:00-05:00