[graap-wg] WS-Agreement and WS-PolicyConstraints

[Anne Anderson]

Colleagues,

I just finished reading WS-Agreement: this is a nice piece of work.

I noticed that the language for constraints or condition expressions in
WS-Agreement is not specified, although XQuery is mentioned as possibly
being suitable.

A group of us in OASIS are discussing a constraint/condition language
based on the functions used in the OASIS XACML access control language.
This language would work very well as a constraint language in
WS-Agreement.  The advantage of this language over XQuery is that the
intersection of two constraints or conditions can be determined
automatically and efficiently (formally based on narrowing algorithm
work, although that is not mentioned in the draft spec). This makes it
easy for one party to determine automatically and with a standard engine
whether the actual conditions and constraints in a proposed agreement
fall within another party's parameters.

The discussion is going on at dipal-discuss at lists.oasis-open.org
("dipal" stands for "domain-independent policy assertion language").
You do not have to be a member of OASIS to participate.  The archives
are at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dipal-discuss/.  DIPAL is
designed to work within any "Boolean combinations of predicates"
framework, such as WS-Policy or the WS-Agreement "All", "OneOrMore", and
"ExactlyOne" compositors.

The draft spec Sun has offered to contribute on RF terms is called
"WS-PolicyConstraints", and is available at
http://research.sun.com/projects/xacml. This spec is based on a Working
Draft developed in the XACML TC by Tim Moses of Entrust; the working
draft is not moving forward in the XACML TC because it goes beyond the
"authorization and access control" charter.  Frank Siebenlist of GGF has
been a strong supporter of both these specs, and is one of the
co-sponsors of the discussion list.

I invite you to participate in our conversation.  I would be happy to
answer any questions.  We have 60 more days to gather interest in
standardizing this work, and we need companies to openly support it in
order to move forward.

Regards,
Anne
-- 
Anne H. Anderson               Anne.Anderson at sun.com
Sun Microsystems Labs          1-781-442-0928
Burlington, MA USA