Thanks to Dr Mark Darbyshire from TIBCO’s Vertical Solutions group for the link to an interesting paper on a “Policy Appliance Reference Model” by K A Taipale, otherwise referred to by the (obvious abbreviation) term “PARM”.
The paper describes PARM as: …an enterprise architecture for information sharing and knowledge management … based on policy appliances (technical control mechanisms to enforce rules) interacting with smart data … and intelligent agents… to reconcile, enforce, and monitor agreed information management policies for information security, data quality, and privacy protection across heterogeneous information sharing systems and networks.
As seems usual, the last sentance is a summary of the description and reads best: [PARM] supports policy-based information management processes through rules-based processing, selective disclosure, and accountability and oversight.
Although PARM is not directed at event processing, it should also be relevant (if not more so) to “data in motion”. Indeed it has many similarities to a CEP-based solution available on request from Dr Darbyshire’s team at TIBCO that exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents to provide a service gateway with embedded policy management, currently deployed for high-performance telco problems but certainly suitable for handling SOA governance in SmartGrid, government, finance and transport type domains too.
