Towards the use of policy decomposition for composite service management by non-expert end-users

With the advent of Web 2.0, as web service composition gets easier, there is a trend towards nonexpert users not just consuming information and services, but also providing, aggregating, composing and eventually managing their own information, services and resources. However non-expert users need to manage their composed services in a way they can understand. Policy-based management promises the ability to control services in a consistent manner via high-level declarative directives, constraints and goals. However, a significant drawback of policy-based management for complex systems remains the lack of an automated mechanism to resolve the meaning of high-level goals so they can be enforced [1,2]. We propose an approach to compose the available heterogeneous management interfaces of underlying constituent services to produce a coherent higher-level management interface for the composite service. This composed management interface can then be presented to the user at a level of abstraction that corresponds to non-expert user´s needs thereby allowing the user to express their specific requirements. Hence the user can manage their composite service, in a manner tailored to them, without the burden of needing to understand how to manage each constituent service. This supports lower-cost user-initiated management, without access to IT experts, thereby increasing productivity and lowering operating costs.