[Distributed services] What is i18n on web services based web applications

Hello, 

The following is my thought about i18n distributed services(Web Services).

- List of work items

We should define the goal of i18n architecture(or model) for web services 
based web applications, and its requirements. The following fig. 1 
illustrates my understanding about Web services except UDDI. As XMLP/SOAP 
is a kind of RPC, service requesters are able to call remote services one 
after another. The calling mechanism is sessionless and stateless 
basically. What is internationalization on that environment?

So far, I am thinking of the following work items.

1. Define the requirement for internationalization of web services based 
web applications(e.g data integrity among services?, locale depend data 
transparency? ...) 
2. Define the goal of internationalization architecture(or model) of web services based web applications.
3. Assess whether existing web related i18n(e.g. Charmod, Unicode based 
i18n such as normalization, collation and charclass, xml i18n, contents 
negotiation, XML media type, etc) is enough for the i18n architecture and 
requirement.
4. If the above work item finds that existing web i18n lacks some functions for web services, identify and propose them(e.g. locale model 
for web? locale categories? SOAP interface for i18n?..., etc) 

Fig 1. 
 
  REQUESTER         PROVIDER A        PROVIDER B 
   CLIENT         +-----------+     +-----------+ 
   TYPE A         |   WSDL    |     |    WSDL   | 
+-----------+     +-----------+     +-----------+
| XMLP/SOAP |<-+->| XMLP/SOAP |<-?->| XMLP/SOAP |
+-----------+  |  +-----------}     +-----------+ 
|    XML    |  |  |    XML    |     |    XML    | 
+-----------+  |  +-----------+     +-----------+ 
|    HTTP   |  |  |    HTTP   |     |    HTTP   |
+-----------+  |  +-----------+     +-----------+
               | 
               +-Locale? Unicode? 
                 Normalize? Charset?-------+
    CLIENT                                 |
    TYPE B           SERVER D              |
+-----+------+    +------------+           | 
|XHTML|XFORMS|<-+-| Transcoder |           |
+-----+------+  | +------------+           |
|    XML     |  | | XMLP/SOAP  |<----------+ 
+------------+  | +------------+
|   HTTP     |  +>|   HTTP     |
+------------+    +------------+

Thanks,
Kentaro Noji
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
IBM, Globalization Center of Competency.
Yamato Software Lab