Patent ID: 8327414

Claim:
A method for performing policy conflict detection and resolution, the method comprising: storing one or more policy rules within a memory of a computing system; semantically analyzing and augmenting at least one component of each of the one or more policy rules by a processor of the computing system to incorporate additional knowledge in the form of semantic relationships to thereby generate a meaning for each at least one component of each of the one or more policy rules; examining, by the processor, each pair of the one or more policy rules for semantic conflicts; and in response to determining the presence of a semantic conflict, determining, by the processor, a semantic equivalence between a component of a policy rule and at least one other component of at least one additional policy rule; wherein the determining a semantic equivalence is performed by using a semantic reasoning algorithm comprising: determining a first policy target of a first policy rule and a second policy target of a second policy rule; determining a meaning of the first policy target and a meaning of the second policy rule using the semantic analysis and augmentation; assigning a confidence value based on the determining the meaning of the first policy; assigning a confidence value based on the determining the meaning of the second policy; performing a semantic comparison between the first policy target and the second policy target; and determining, based at least in part on the semantic comparison, the presence of a conflict between the first policy target and the second policy target.