Towards a Semantic Framework for Policy Exchange in the Internet

The major issue addressed in autonomous data source management, notably within the framework of data exchange, is the variety of heterogeneous data schemas — the forms the data must take. But semantics that give meaning to the factual data can be autonomous as well. In certain context such as Internet routing that lacks a central authority, both the data item — distributed routing tables that collectively constitute a global path, and the semantic data — polices that determine the selection of routing path, are independently managed by networks (autonomous systems (ASes)) participating in the Internet. A long standing networking problem is inflexible policy routing due to the lack of policy sharing mechanisms. This paper seeks to extend the classic data exchange framework to semantic data as a means to manage distributed, autonomous routing polices in the Internet. Specifically, we make the case of knowledge exchange, and use policy exchange as a driving problem — a special case — to understand the semantic framework of knowledge exchange: We identify several unique challenges, and illustrate how answer set programming — originally developed for knowledge representation with negation and non-monotonic reasoning, and residue method based transformation — originally developed for semantic query optimization, may serve as a point solution to the specific policy exchange problem.