Usable Policy Template Authoring for Iterative Policy Refinement

People must have usable tools in order to author and maintain high-quality policies. In this paper we discuss policy templates as a mechanism for policy authoring. We believe that policy templates can be leveraged to make policy authoring more usable and to provide consistent policy authoring interfaces across a wide variety of policy domains. Templates provide users with a structured format for authoring policies; however, a general approach for creating policy templates has not been described in published research to date. Based on research in policy management, we propose an iterative policy refinement process that consists of three user roles and spans policy authoring, template authoring, and policy element definition. We designed a GUI-based prototype that enables users to create policy templates. In this paper we describe our proposed policy refinement process, the necessary user roles, a template authoring prototype, and the results of an empirical study of template authoring.