Context Model Based SOA Policy Framework

With the popularity of SOA, SOA policy becomes one of the core technical enablers for SOA governance and management. Different in several aspects from traditional policy for distributed system management, policy applied in SOA solutions needs to take into account various policy types and enforcement points in different layers of SOA solution stack and different phases of SOA lifecycle. As well, it has the unique requirements on compliance to match existing SOA technologies and characteristics, as simplicity, standardization, high performance, etc. In this paper, a novel context model based SOA policy management framework by innovatively extending W3C Service Modeling Language (SML) and ISO Schematron is introduced. Firstly, a common context model distilled from SOA policy types typically including service policy, service governance policy, application policy and business policy, is presented. Then, the core components - context model based policy engine and definition tool are described. Finally, it is illustrated how the unified definition tools and policy engine are manipulated within the context model based SOA policy framework to manage and enforce policies in typical scenarios as service meta-data management, service match making and business process management. Based on the project, we participated in the works for defining W3C SML V1.1 working draft and proposed the works introduced in this paper to W3C SML Working Group. This paper demonstrates how these technologies and architectures significantly enhance the capability of SOA governance and management throughout whole SOA lifecycle and spanning the layers of SOA solution stack.