WS-Governance: A Policy Language for SOA Governance

The widespread use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is beginning to create problems derived from the governance of said structures. To date there is not a single effective solution to solve all existing challenges to govern this type of infrastructure. This paper describes the problems encountered when designing a SOA governance solution in a real e-Government scenario. More specifically, we focus on problems related to specification and automated analysis of government policies. We propose a novel SOA governance specification model as a solution to these problems. We have named this model WS-Governance. In order to ease its adoption by SOA practitioners it: i) shares WS-Policy guidelines and is compatible with it, ii) has XML serialization as well as a plain-text one and iii) has a CSP based semantics that provides a precise description as well as facilitating the automation of some editing and WS-Governance related activities such as consistency checking.