Policy Support for Business-oriented Web Service Management Stephen Gorton and Stephan Reiff-Marganiec Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH United Kingdom Latin-American Web Congress, Cholula, Mexico, October

SOC and web services Services are: –Loosely coupled units of software available over a network, exposed by well- defined interfaces; –Based on open standards; –Composable, i.e. you can orchestrate two or more together to make a composite service. Web services: –A popular implementation of SOA, incorporating open standards such as XML; –Are also optionally self-describing and discoverable; –Communicate via standard HTTP. “Service-oriented computing (SOC) is an architectural approach to building loosely coupled applications.” Abstract Web Service Protocol Stack APPEL Composition (BPEL, etc.) UDDI, USML, etc. WSDL, WSCM, etc. Messaging (HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, etc.) Wizards, Display Managers, etc. Presentation Policy Enterprise Description Transport Discovery

Service management Present: –Not huge uptake in WS; –Lots of “large” implementations; –Relatively few open access services; –Amazon, Ebay and Google provide public WS interfaces. Future: –Lots of WS? –“Smaller” WS capable of doing more atomic activities? –Composition of WS provides required functionality. Business needs: –Align IT objectives with business objectives; –Adaptability and flexibility of systems; –Business-oriented management? “As a substantial number of Web Services become available, so the attention shift will be from service infrastructure to service management”. Casati et al. Business-oriented management of Web Services. Comm. ACM, 46(10):55-60, Corporate Space Project Space Service Space Task WS Business Domain Web Service Domain WS Task Rule Task Rule Tasks map to (composite) services Composition / Orchestration Mechanisms

How can we use policies? Express preferences –“I will only fly with British Airways on flights lasting over 8 hours” –“Given a choice, I prefer to use a supplier in my phone book” –Options: Modalities include must, should, prefer, and their negations. Express requirements –“Purchase a rail ticket from X to Y, with times T and S…” –“Quote for a holiday” –Options: Unbounded on what we can express Restrictions are on classifications of requirements (tags). Express restrictions –“Services not allowed from originating country X” –Capping the maximum expense claim amount Not a web service policy but a management policy

Policies and web services Policies are: –“…information that can be used to modify the behaviour of a system.” (Lupu and Sloman. Conflicts in Policy-based Distributed Systems Management. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Nov Policy Examples: –WS-Policy Including WS-PolicyAttachment –Access control: Ponder KAoS Rein XACML WSPL –Automatic negotiations Lamparter and Agarwal. Specification of policies for automatic negotiations of web services. In L. Kagal, T. Finin and J. Hendlerm, editors, SWPW, Our policies are: “a high level statement as to how business requirements should be processed in the management system.”

Appel policy framework The Accent Project Policy Environment/Language; A Policy Description Language (PDL), allowing users to write their own policies; Designed by Reiff-Marganiec et al at the University of Stirling; S. Reiff-Marganiec, K. Turner and L. Blair. Appel: The Accent policy environment/language. Technical report CSM-164, University of Stirling, Jun Developed for the Accent project (telecommunications control). PDL allows for the definition of ECA policies or goals; Appel defines an XML Schema based around: –Triggers –Conditions –Actions Extended by functions: –Prompt to get information from the user –Display to output data in some visual format

Appel policies Triggers (adapted from the SENSORIA ontology): –Message events –Time events –Change events –Service events –Interaction events Conditions: –Checks on local or remote data values Includes standard operators Actions –Core information in the policy –Defines what service to invoke via different tags –Can specify more than one action with tags,,,, or … … … …

Specifying requirements 1 Local functionality: –System messaging (more applicable to triggers) … … Service classification: –Domain, subdomain Service functionality: –Inputs; –Preconditions; –Postconditions; –Outputs; –Exceptions; –Side effects … conditions … display(this) function() …

Specifying requirements 2 Quality: –Any identified qualitative value can be addressed, provided it is published in the directory entry (UDDI or similar), or it is “testable”; –Qualitative checks based on similar condition checks; –Named parameters compared against values; –Operators include: Equal to Less than Less than or equal to Greater than Greater than or equal to price leq 0 …

<policy id=“Query for cheapest train ticket (UK)” enabled=“true” changed=“ T15:51:00”> Example usage – train tickets must start location eq UK <action arg1=“promptUser(Departure Station)” arg2=“promptUser(Arrival Station)” arg3=“promptUser(Date of Travel)” arg4=“promptUser(Fast or Cheap)” arg5=“promptUser(Railcard)”> Travel Ticket Vendor Further actions…

Example usage: functionality specification from(arg1) from(arg2) from(arg3) from(arg4) from(arg5) list empty display(this) display_empty() display_exception(this) default disallow default allow

Example usage: quality specification price leq 0 availability eq now invokeService(functionality, quality)

Further work Domain restriction or classification; Interaction of policies with task maps; Refinement of policy functions and definition of further functions; Integration of this technology with service coordination technology; Mapping of task maps to workflow languages (e.g. YAWL) Related work: –Task maps –SRML –YAWL

Summary and Conclusions With increasing numbers of web services, management will shift further into the business domain; –Management of software will shift closer to the business analyst rather than the software engineer; –Align IT objectives with business objectives. Appel extended as a PDL for SOC: –Users define their own policies to express goals, requirements and preferences; –Extension functions allow us to address the SOC domain. Trivial example of purchasing a ticket. Questions? Department of Computer Science