Using temporal policies for managing changing meta-data of Web Services

摘要

Web Services (WS) meta-data is used to formally describe functional and non-functional concerns of web services (such as capabilities, price). Several properties described by meta-data change over time. For example, prices and technical availability may change frequently, but are usually stored in static XML documents. In this paper, we introduce the temporal policy language to facilitate temporal management of structured documents. Temporal aspects can be applied to documents, such as service descriptions, or even properties in structured documents. Validity periods can be added to these properties, such that customers can easily check whether certain properties (e.g., prices) in a document are valid.