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A Web Service is a software application identified by a URI [IETF RFC 2396], whose interfaces and binding are capable of being defined, described and discovered by XML artifacts and supports direct interactions with other software applications using XML based messages via Internet-based protocols.
As such, the full range of application functionality can be exposed in a Web service. In the course of creating the [Web Service I18N Usage Scenarios], the W3C Internationalization Working Group has discovered that, in order for there to be complete interoperability, internationalization options must be exposed in a consistent way in the messages exchanged between systems using Web services and that Web service descriptions may need to describe capabilities or limitations to potential users.
The following is a list of the requirements to address these issues.
R001Create a SOAP feature that describes an "international context" header that can be exchanged for services that are locale affected and need to know the requester's preferred locale.
R002 Create a WSDL feature that describes the SOAP Feature in R001.
R003 Create a WSDL feature that allows a service to describe its "locale execution policy." That is, whether it is service-determined, user-influenced, or neutral and what additional information may be derived of interest to users of the service. This will also allow different policies to be bound to the same instance of a service.
R004 Create a SOAP Feature that describes the locale execution policy to apply to a service (in a request) or which as applied to a service (in a response) as described in the Web service description defined in R003. This may be an adjunct to R001.
R005 Create a standardized set of identifiers that describe different international preferences. Specifically, "locale", "collation", and "timezone". This work might be associated with an registered extension to a proposed update (see Internet-Draft Phillips/Davis) to RFC 3066, as well as emerging standards in the area of collation identifiers.