]> 2005-03-07T10:00:00-05:00 2005-03-07T11:05:00-05:00 In this thesis, we present RIDE, an integrated policy development environment that uses a wizard-based approach to provide a user-friendly and extensible graphical user interface. RIDE (Rei Integrated Development Environment) has been developed as a plug-in extension of Eclipse workbench and enables the development of policies specified in Rei, which is a declarative, machine-understandable policy specification language. As our main goal was to facilitate policy development for distributed systems, we chose Rei specifications because Rei is grounded in a web ontology language that allows it to model different kinds of domain knowledge and it has been successfully deployed in several open, dynamic distributed environments.

RIDE attempts to meet the requirements of a wide range of policy-based environments for which existing tools provide little or no support. This is possible due to the unique combination of following features it supports: (1) simple, user-friendly interface offering valid input options through the entire process, (2) ease of management of domain information by offering the option of template creation, (3) automation of the complex and error-prone policy creation process by automatically generating user-defined policies in Rei, (4) ability to express individual as well as group policies, (5) ability to accommodate information spanning multiple domains by using ontologies to represent domain information, (6) policy creation over speech acts that are used for dynamic policy management, (7) support for creation and verification of policy test-cases for checking policy conformance, and (8) conformity to the principles outlined by Human Computer Interaction by performing iterative evaluation and refinement of the interface to make it as simple and useful as possible from user's perspective.]]>