Introduction to Usage Scenarios, proposed draft

All:

Per our teleconference, here is a new draft version of the Usage Scenarios document introductory section. I have modified Kentaroh's text slightly and added several blocks designed to allay the (legitimate) concerns of the various WS working groups.

Kentaroh: could you please incorporate these changes? Others: please send comments to the list for discussion.

Best Regards,

Addison
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1 Introduction

This document specifies a variety of Web Services internationalization usage scenarios and use cases.

The goal of the Web Services Internationalization Task Force is to ensure that Web Services have robust support for global use, including all of the world's languages and cultures. 

The goal of this document is to examine the different ways that language, culture, and related issues interact with Web Services architectures and technology. Ultimately this will allow us to develop standards and best practices for those interested in implementing internationalized Web Services. We may also discover latent international considerations in the various Web Services standards and propose solutions to the responsible groups working in these areas.

Web Services provide a world-wide distributed environment that uses XML based messaging to provide access to distributed objects, application integration, data/information exchange, presentation aggregation, and other rich machine-to-machine interaction. The global reach of the Internet requires support for the international creation, publication and discovery of Web Services. Although the technologies and protocols used in Web Services (such as HTTP, XML, XML Schema, and so forth) are generally quite mature as "international-ready" technologies, Web Services may require additional perspective in order to provide the best internationalized performance, because they represent a way of accessing distributed logic via a URI.

As a result, this document attempts to describe the different scenarios in which international use of Web Services may require care on the part of the implementer or user or to demonstrate potential issues with Web Services technology.

This document describes the following kinds of usage scenarios:

   1. Locale neutral vs. locale-sensitive XML messages and data exchange
   2. Interaction between Web services and the underlying software system's international functionality.
   3. Message processing in Web Services. e.g. SOAP Fault message etc.

The scope of this document is described in the section 1.1 below.

1.1 Scope

This document follows the definition of Web Services specified in the Chapter 2, Web services Architecture Document [1].

Definition: A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.

In order to narrow down the scope, the usage scenarios in this document are limited to the following W3C technologies and deliverables.

    * SOAP V1.2 Documents
    * WSDL V1.2 Documents
    * Web Services Architecture Documents

Ideally, internationalized Web Services should be easy to create, publish and discover. 

The scope of Web Services internationalization is:

    * W3C internationalization working group deliverables, including:
      * Web services requirements
      * Unicode Inc. technologies and deliverables
      * Concepts and application of distributed Locales and locale-affected preferences
      * Web services internationalization best practices

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Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods, Inc.

+1 408.962.5487 (phone)  +1 408.210.3569 (mobile)
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Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature. 

Chair, W3C-I18N-WG Web Services Task Force
To participate see http://www.w3.org/International/ws

Received on Friday, 6 December 2002 15:13:22 UTC