Policy Parser

Figure 1: Policy Parser Firefox Sidebar

Please install Tabulator Firefox Extension. This is not required for the "Policy Parser" to work. However, it would render the output rdf/n3 nicely on the browser itself. The absence of the Tabulator extension will make you download the generated file, and you will have to open it with a text editor to view the contents.

First of all the user will have to specify a name for the policy that he/she intends to create. This name could be something like "MIT Prox Card Data Policy" or "Massachusetts Disability Discrimination Policy". It is up to the user to select a meaningful name.

The user will then have to select a particular domain ontology. Once the domain ontology is selected the user can view the contents of the ontology by clicking the "View" button. It should be borne in mind that the lexicon of the the system is limited by the phrases indicated in the rdfs:label tags. Therefore it would be a good practice to look at the domain ontology (especially if you are writing your own sentence). The following figure shows a typical domain ontology:

Figure 2: Example Domain Ontology

When inputing a sentence, the user has two options. He/she can select from pre-defined sentences displayed in the drop-down box (which are guaranteed to work) OR input a sentence manually by looking at the sentence format.

Once a name is given to the policy, a domain ontology is selected, and a sentence is specified, the user can press the "parse" button. This will invoke the python Policy Parser web service hosted at http://scripts.mit.edu/~oshani/justparseit/code/server/run.py with the corresponding parameters. Please note that there could be a slight delay in seeing the actual result (so please be patient!). Once the result is sent back to the browser, provided that you have installed Tabulator you would be able to see the following:

If you do not have Tabulator installed, you would be asked to download a file. Once you open that file, you could see the generated AIR policy similar to the following:

Figure 4: Policy Parser Output if Tabulator is not installed

Now that you have generated the AIR policy you could make it persistant by either storing it in your local file system, or somewhere on the World Wide Web. For demonstration purposes, we have chosen to save it in a WebDAV space so that it will be universally accessible through a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). If you have your own WebDav space, please feel free to enter it in the text box underneath "Store the generated policy here: ". By default this text box contains the value:
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2008/webdav/policy.n3.
You could enter a new name instead of "policy.n3" and click the "Store Policy" button. When storing the policy it will ask for authorization. You can try out this feature by using the temperory username "policyparser" and password "policyparser". Once you have clicked the "Store Policy" you could view the policy in it's new storage location by clicking the "View Policy" button.

If you are interested, you can see how this generated policy may be reasoned over a log file (which includes a set of facts) by the AIR reasoner. For this particular demo, you would have to select a log file from the drop down box, and press the "Fetch Log" button. If you wish to see the contents of the log file, you have to click the "View Log" button. Once you have cicked it you should be able to see the following:

Figure 5: Sample Log File

If you have performed all the steps above, you are all set to invoke the AIR reasoner. Click the "Run Reasoner" button and you should be able to get the following output: