A goal-based approach for automated specification of Information Quality policies

Abstract

Organizational and social aspects are key factors for the analysis of Information Quality (IQ) requirements. This is particularly true in the case of complex socio-technical systems where computerized components coexist with humans and social structures and effective IQ policies can be defined only as a combination of all these factors. Although, several policy-based approaches have been proposed in the literature, none of them offer an adequate conceptual support to combine the technical and organizational perspective in the analysis of IQ requirements. In this paper, we propose a goal-based approach based on an extended version of Secure Tropos to model and analyze IQ requirements from a socio-technical perspective. Our approach provides mechanisms for an automatic derivation of IQ policies, which are specified in terms of permitted, forbidden and obligated activities. Verification of correctness and consistency of the derived policies are supported by automated analysis techniques. We illustrated our approach with an example concerning the stock market system.