Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.13. POLICY TAXONOMY AND VOCABULARY

A key challenge to an integrated policy model is a policy taxonomy and vocabulary for defining, describing, and uniting various business, process, design, security, and runtime policies. While the standards bodies have made great strides with various technical standards for policy definition, policy assertions, and automated enforcement of these policies (called "runtime governance" by many), the same cannot be said for manual policies or for integrating manual policies with automated policies. For example, the Web services policy framework known as WS-Policy is a standard under oversight by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This standard employs the policy terminology listed below:^[]

^[] Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy), V. 1.2, www.w3.org/Submission/WS-Policy, March 2006.

• Policy: A policy is a collection of policy alternatives.

• Policy Alternative: A policy alternative is a collection of policy assertions.

• Policy Assertion: A policy assertion represents an individual requirement, capability, or other property of a behavior.

• Policy Expression: A policy expression is an XML Infoset representation of a policy.

• Policy Subject: A policy subject is an entity (e.g., an endpoint, message, resource, interaction) with which a policy can be associated.

• Policy Scope: A policy scope is the collection of policy subjects to which a policy may apply.

• Policy Attachment: A policy attachment is a mechanism for associating policy with one or more policy scopes. ...