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Ruben Verborgh

Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal

Patrick Hochstenbach, Beatriz Esteves, and Ruben Verborgh

Ensuring that humans and autonomous agents can accurately interpret and act on complex policies is critical to maintaining trust, compliance, and accurate data exchange across the Web. Without interoperable and machine-interpretable policies governing the exchange of personal data on the Web, there is a strong risk of misinterpretation and legal ambiguity when automated agents negotiate and instantiate data-sharing agreements. In this regard, this article identifies a set of challenges that need to be tackled by policy-based agents to have (semi)automated communication and negotiation of data exchange terms for the sharing and using personal data on the Web. A literature review was conducted to assess the progress made in addressing the set of challenges across four domains: (i) compliance checking, (ii) consistency checking, (iii) requirement checking, and (iv) negotiation. By examining the state of the art, we demonstrate that these challenges are interrelated but are addressed using a heterogeneous mix of solutions, prioritizing pragmatism over a formal foundation that applies across all four domains. The way forward lies in the resurgence of logic programming languages that offer essential support for built-in predicates, negation, and meta-programming.

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Published in 2025 in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{hochstenbach_opal_2025,
  author = {Hochstenbach, Patrick and Esteves, Beatriz and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal},
  booktitle = {Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference},
  editor = {Sabou, Marta and Harth, Andreas and Lisena, Pasquale and Curry, Edward and Zhang, Bohui and Alharbi, Reham and He, Yuan and Rehm, Georg and Schimmler, Sonja and Dietze, Stefan and Manola, Natalia and Cimmino, Andrea and Fornara, Nicoletta and Rodríguez-Doncel, Víctor and Domingue, John and Rettinger, Achim and Trilling, Damian and Grobelnik, Marko and d'Amato, Claudia and Fionda, Valeria and Tiddi, Ilaria and Tolomei, Gabriele},
  year = 2025,
  month = jun,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  volume = 3977,
  issn = {1613-0073},
  url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3977/OPAL2025-2.pdf},
}

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ACM
Patrick Hochstenbach, Beatriz Esteves, and Ruben Verborgh. 2025. Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal. In Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (CEUR Workshop Proceedings).
APA
Hochstenbach, P., Esteves, B., & Verborgh, R. (2025). Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal. In M. Sabou, A. Harth, P. Lisena, E. Curry, B. Zhang, R. Alharbi, Y. He, G. Rehm, S. Schimmler, S. Dietze, N. Manola, A. Cimmino, N. Fornara, V. Rodríguez-Doncel, J. Domingue, A. Rettinger, D. Trilling, M. Grobelnik, C. d’Amato, … G. Tolomei (Eds.), Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (Vol. 3977).
IEEE
P. Hochstenbach, B. Esteves, and R. Verborgh, “Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal,” in Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference, 2025, vol. 3977.
LNCS
Hochstenbach, P., Esteves, B., Verborgh, R.: Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal. In: Sabou, M., Harth, A., Lisena, P., Curry, E., Zhang, B., Alharbi, R., He, Y., Rehm, G., Schimmler, S., Dietze, S., Manola, N., Cimmino, A., Fornara, N., Rodríguez-Doncel, V., Domingue, J., Rettinger, A., Trilling, D., Grobelnik, M., d’Amato, C., Fionda, V., Tiddi, I., and Tolomei, G. (eds.) Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference (2025).
MLA
Hochstenbach, Patrick, et al. “Automated Policy Negotiation: a Four-Course Meal.” Workshops and Tutorials Proceedings of the 22nd Extended Semantic Web Conference, edited by Marta Sabou et al., vol. 3977, 2025.

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