WS-TemporalPolicy: A WS-Policy Extension for Describing Service Properties with Time Constraints

A Web service has several functional properties (e.g. its operations) and non-functional properties (e.g. quality of service and security parameters). Functional properties are usually static, whereas non-functional properties are often dynamic and thus vary over time. To describe properties with time constraints, the paper introduces WS-TemporalPolicy. WS-TemporalPolicy empowers a service developer to attach a validity period to the properties described in a WS-policy. The generation, validation, storage and retrieval, and deployment process of temporal policies is supported by the Temporal Policy Runtime Environment. Implementation issues and two use cases are presented to illustrate the use of temporal policies.