Enterprise Data Sharing Requirements: Rich Policy Languages And Intuitive User Interfaces

Enterprises, from medical to financial, commercial, and military commonly share many types of data with many partner enterprises to accomplish their goals. Enterprise data sharing comes with three challenges: First, it needs to be tailored and selective so that not all of an enterprise's data is shared with everyone, or even that whichever data an enterprise decides to share is shared with all. Rather enterprises want to share only on a need-to-know basis. Second, data sharing policies need to be represented in a machine-readable format so that requests for data can be handled in an automated way to ensure fast, reliable, and consistent sharing. Third, an intuitive and easy to use data sharing language is essential to facilitate effective creation and management of data sharing policies by end users. To overcome these challenges, we have developed 1) a rich policy language that allows the expression of data sharing intentions through a small number of concise policy definitions that can adapt to a wide variety of different scenarios, and 2) highly usable interfaces for creating and reviewing policies without requiring intensive training. We previously described aspects of a system that works towards these goals (Briesemeister et al. 2019; Martiny et al. 2018). Here, we describe system improvements that bring us closer to highly expressive yet highly usable tailored data sharing capabilities for enterprises.