The Place of Policy in Semantically Enabled Service-oriented Architectures

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) suggest that IT systems should be developed from coarse-grained, loosely coupled, business-aligned components, so called services. One way towards loose coupling is to refrain from hard-coding policies in the system and to represent them explicitly. This approach is increasingly implemented in Web service deployments (the main realization of SOAs). Semantic Web services (SWS) add semantics to Web services, to automate the various tasks common in service-oriented systems. While some work has been done on semantic approaches to policy expression and evaluation, SWS research so far has mostly ignored policies, therefore in this paper we analyze where Web service policies fit within the context of SWS.