2.        Policy Infrastructure - an interaction system based on established rules for processes of authentication, authorization, negotiation and transaction.

a.        Registry - a compilation of interaction rules.

b.       Supplicant - a person or a token acting on behalf of a person, seeking identity verification.

c.        Sentinel - a reception and judgment entity for authentication of a supplicant, and for authorization of content access.

d.       Portal - an access barrier to the source of content.

e.        Authentication - identification and verification of asserted identity

f.         Authorization - permission to access a portal according to policy rules.

g.       Application Infrastructure - common models of negotiation and transactions.

h.       Application Registry - a collection of entities and processes used with a common theme or purpose.

Within social ecosystems that are not specifically computer aided or based, these components may exist as structured formal elements such as the United States Code, or they may exist as informal yet substantial knowledge shared by the social group in question; for example, the identity registry of the members of an extended family. Likewise, the processes engaged in such systems may be informally defined and applied. However, we can draw a number of observations from the interactions within such systems that can form the basis for more formal definitions of similar processes within computer based social ecosystems.

The structure of modern democracies is patterned after the XVIII^th Century’s The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu, who reformulated principles first established by the Greeks and Romans, adding equality (“égalité”) and a worldwide review of policy practices to their view of the world. It goes to the credit of XVIII^th Century philosophers that in the XXI^st Century, the political discourse, if now different from shedding away some of the racist and supremacist theories of the time, is not essentially different in its constitution. Montesquieu would be as comfortable reading modern political writings as we are reading his original words. However, in the new world of computer networks, such a theory needs to be formalized to be accessible to computers. This is what we will now do, hoping, as usual, that such formalization will in return allow us to better understand the original concepts as formulated by Montesquieu and more than two centuries of subsequent writing.

Within a collection of hierarchical social ecosystems that encompass a broad geographical area and are intended to function over a long period of time, it is necessary to specify the elements of trust and policy in a manner that can be disbursed across both time and space. For purely human interactions, as our species evolved this facility required the use of language, both spoken and written. The same is true for the specification and implementation of policy infrastructures that encompass widespread computer networks. To fully exploit the benefits that computer systems can bring to such an environment, the language used for this expression must be capable of supporting significant computer utilization of it. Specifically, computer systems should be able to reason about the information prescribed by the language, a point that we considered in some detail in Chapter 8.

Within the current digital trust infrastructures, the set of languages through which policy is communicated is still to emerge. Essentially every application system defines its own language,

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