Policies for Web Services: Improving the Description of Services

Web services are predominantly used to implement service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, there are several areas such as temporal dimensions, real-time, streaming, or efficient and flexible file transfers where needs arise to extend web service functionality. These extensions can, for example, be achieved using web service policies (WS-Policies). Since there are often alternative solutions to provide functionality (e.g., different protocols can be used to achieve the transfer of data), the WS-Policy standard is especially useful to extend web service descriptions with policies. The standard describes how to create policies to generally state the properties under which a service is provided. Two novel policies are presented as well as their applicability to several areas, such as streaming, real-time, transfer of data, and usability.