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1.1 Motivation

In recent years, the management of information technology systems has been found to be increasingly based on the use of policies. This is due to the fact that policy-based management is very flexible in the sense that the use of policies can be separated from any particular application. In addition, policy-based management entails a different approach to performing management tasks since it specifies management at different levels of abstraction.

The integrated application of policy-based management is achieved by the cooperation of interconnected processes. These processes need to be managed in a way which supports the policy concept.

In this context, metapolicies are an emerging tool for managing policies. Metapolicies have been introduced in the literature as ``policies about policies''. Using them for managing policy related processes, however, is a new approach.



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