Policy-based service registration and discovery

The WS-Policy framework has been introduced to allow policy to be expressed and associated with Web Services thereby enabling organizations to manage the quality of their services. How the specified polices are kept consistent with the organization's regulations, and how to match service and client policies requirements for effective service discovery, are issues yet to be addressed. In this paper, we present a new approach that allows for the automatic verification and matching of policies, using a service registry that serves as a policy storage and management facility, a policy checkpoint during service publication and as a policy matchmaker during service discovery. We extend WS-Policy with a policy conformance operator for policy verification and use WS-Policy Intersection for policy matching. We develop a policy information model and policy processing logics for the registry. An implementation of a policy-enabled service registry is also introduced.