UML-based profiles for policy-aware web services

Abstract

The promise of web service technology is to offer an efficient way for B2B communications. Web service description might cover three aspects: functional, non-functional and behavioural aspects. Policies are used to define constraints on functional and behavioural web service offer and also to express the web services? non-functional properties, which are related to various specific domains such as the security and the quality of service. These policies are crucial in different service processes, especially in the negotiation phase of service discovery and selection. In the present work, we address how to specify user context policy domain in the design level, how to define web services policies based on the defined domain and how to attach these policies to the service capabilities. We propose UML-based profiles and transformation rules to model policy assertions? domains, specify web services policies and generate the executable files. The paper aims to minimise the development cost and help developers overcome the complexity of the WS-Policy language using the proposed model-driven architecture (MDA) approach.