Verification, Validation and Integrity of Distributed and Interchanged Rule Based Policies and Contracts in the Semantic Web

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been stu died in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representat ion languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to form alize real-world decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts an SE methodology from extreme programming, namely t est driven development, and discusses how it can be adapted to verificat ion, validation and integrity testing (V&V&I) of policy and contract sp ecifications. Since, the test-driven approach focuses on the behavioral a spects and the drawn conclusions instead of the structure of the rule base a nd the causes of faults, it is independent of the complexity of the rule lan guage and the system under test and thus much easier to use and understand f or the rule engineer and the user.