Two publications, [Hosm 91] and [Hosm 92], by Hilary H. Hosmer are the only publications devoted entirely to the concept of metapolicies. All other publications mention metapolicies mostly as a marginal topic.
By Hosmer, policies are seen in the context of large, complex, and interrelated trusted systems and understood as ``a set of constraints established by an accepted authority to facilitate group activity.'' Special areas of interest are security policies, which are ``the plans of an organization to meet its security goals.'' Subpolicies are policies which govern concerns of a broader policy [Hosm 92].
The metapolicy concept by Hosmer is motivated by the desire to turn implicit information in policies into explicit information and to incorporate a set of rules for guiding the application of multiple policies. In [Hosm 92], they are defined as follows:
Metapolicies are policies about policies. They make the rules and assumptions about policies explicit rather than implicit and coordinate the interaction of multiple policies.
Two aspects are mentioned, the implicit information of policies and the coordination of multiple policies. Both are presented in the following subsections.