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This document is a W3C Working Group Note, made available by the W3C Internationalization Working Group (Web Services Internationalization Task Force) as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity. It describes requirements for the internationalization of Web services and is intended for review by W3C Members and other interested parties. It is also intended to serve as a basis for future work on Web service internationalization.
There were only very few changes since the last publication. The main change is the addition of requirement R007 about integration with the overall Web services architecture and existing technologies. The wording of the other requirements was changed to not favor solutions that are still under discussion. Text has been streamlined and references have been updated.
The Internationalization Working Group (Web Services Internationalization Task Force) thinks that this document has reached a sufficient level of maturity to be published as a Working Group Note, and does not intend to issue new versions in the near future. This does not exclude that the document may be updated at a later stage, after more experience has been gained with the internationalization of Web services.
The Internationalization Working Group or its successor will keep track of any further comments and discussion relating to this document, and invites any such comments or discussion. Please send comments on this document to the www-i18n-comments@w3.org mailing list (public archive). Please use [Web Services] or [WSReq] in the subject.
At the time of publication, the Working Group believed there were no patent disclosures relevant to this specification. A current list of patent disclosures relevant to this specification may be found on the Working Group's patent disclosure page.
Publication as a Working Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C, including the Team and Membership.
1 Introduction
2 Requirements
2.1 R007 Integrate Internationalization with Web Services Standards
2.2 R001 Locale Information in SOAP
2.3 R002 Locale Information in WSDL
2.4 R003 International Policies in WSDL
2.5 R004 International Policies in SOAP
2.6 R005 Locale Identifiers
2.7 R006 Multi-Lingual Service Discovery Requirements
A References (Non-Normative)
B Acknowledgements (Non-Normative)
A Web Service is a software application identified by a URI [RFC2396], whose interfaces and binding are capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts, and which supports direct interactions with other software applications using XML-based messages via Internet-based protocols. The full range of application functionality can be exposed in a Web service.
The W3C Internationalization Working Group, Web Services Task Force, was chartered to examine Web Services for internationalization issues. The result of this work is the Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios document [WSIUS]. Some of the scenarios in that document demonstrate that, in order to achieve worldwide usability, internationalization options must be exposed in a consistent way in the definitions, descriptions, messages, and discovery mechanisms that make up Web services.
The following is a list of the requirements to address these issues.
Problem Statement: Internationalization should be integrated with the architecture and general evolution of Web services and should not represent a departure in design from existing solutions.
Requirement: Specifications and formats developed for the internationalization of Web services should be composable with other quality-of-service type standards, such as those related to security, reliable messaging, or addressing.
Problem Statement: Service providers and services need information about the locale, language preference, time zone, or other international preferences (such as currency, collation, etc.) of the requester.
Requirement: A Specification or Specifications for a SOAP header or data structure (possibly a SOAP Feature, see [SOAP-Feature], Section 5: A Convention for Describing Features and Bindings) to send the Web service provider international context information (such as locale, language, or other culturally linked preferences) about the requester and which the provider can use to tailor the language, invocation, or operation of services or the operation of the provider (such as language selection in the generation of Faults and so forth).
Problem Statement: Service providers need to indicate that the SOAP headers or data structures described in R001 are available for a specific service or collection of services. The specific "international preference" information of use to the service or aspects of the service must be described so that properly formatted data can be interchanged, enabling internationalized operation.
Requirement: A specification or specifications for WSDL data structures that can be use in Web service descriptions to indicate that the headers or data structures described in R001 are available for a particular service and describe the binding and invocation requirements related to this.
Problem Statement: Service providers need a way to provide information about how a specific instance of a locale-affected Web service will execute or to differentiate instances of the same service.
Examples: For service 'Z', binding 'A' executes in French, binding 'B' executes in Japanese, and binding 'C' attempts to match the user's preferences.
Requirement: A specification or specifications for WSDL data structures that allow a service to describe a "locale execution policy" for a service or a binding of a service, including any additional derived information of interest to users of the service (allowing users to select the service and binding that most closely matches their needs or to tailor the operation of the service via header information). The specification(s) must allow services to describe one or more languages or locales available for a specific service and allow for a runtime user choice (language/locale negotiation) when that is appropriate. They must also provide a way to indicate that a specific service always executes using specific international settings or returns data in a specific language.
Problem Statement: Given the WSDL features in R003, requesters must be able to indicate their preferences (when choices exist) when invoking a service and providers must be able to indicate which choice was applied when the service actually executed (as in a response).
Requirement: A specification or specifications for SOAP headers or data structures that describe the locale preferences the requester wishes to have applied to a service (in a request) or which were actually applied to a service by the provider (in a response) as described in the Web service description defined in R003. This mechanism may be the same as in R001.
Problem Statement: Although there exist standards for identifying languages and language preferences on the Web, there are no standards for identifying locales or certain other international preferences. These data structures are of interest in enabling Web services and other Web applications for multi-lingual or global operation.
Requirement: A standard for identifying platform neutral international preferences (that is, locale identifiers). This should include the protocol for matching requests with actual values (locale negotiation), along with guidelines for implementation. Possible mechanisms for this might be a standard extension to the proposed extension [ID-langtags] of RFC 3066 [RFC3066] that describes international preferences or the use of URIs to refer to locale data or identifiers on the Web.
Problem Statement: Web service discovery needs to allow users to find the same service in multiple languages and to find services that will meet their specific language or locale requirements.
Requirement: Document best practices and approaches for the discovery of Web services, including via non-W3C standards such as UDDI.
Requirement: Liaise with appropriate standards organizations working on Web service discovery.
This document is the work of the Web Services Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group. The participants in this task force contributing to the development of these requirements and the content of this document are: Debasish Banerjee (IBM), Martin Dürst (W3C), Mike McKenna (University of California), Takao Suzuki (Microsoft), Tex Texin (Xencraft), Mary Trumble (IBM), Andrea Vine (Sun Microsystems)