This document is also available in these non-normative formats: XML.
Copyright © 2003 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is a first Working Draft describing requirements for Web services internationalization, for review by W3C members and other interested parties. Although this is a first Working Draft , we think that the requirements described in this document are very close to the final requirements. The final target of the Working Draft is publication as a Note. We intend to use these requirements as input for the next phase of our work.
This document has been produced by the Web Services Internationalization Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group, as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity.
Discussion of this document takes place on the public mailing list
public-i18n-ws@w3.org.
To contribute or comment, please subscribe by sending mail to
public-i18n-ws-request@w3.org
with subscribe as the subject. The
archive of this list can be read
by the general public.
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.
This document is work in progress and does not imply endorsement by, or the consensus of the members of the Web Services Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group. Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
1 Introduction
2 Requirements
2.1 R001 SOAP Locale Feature
2.2 R002 WSDL Locale Feature
2.3 R003 WSDL International Policy Feature
2.4 R004 SOAP International Policy Feature
2.5 R005 Locale Identifiers
2.6 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 [WSUS].Some of the scenarios in this document demonstrate that 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: 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 SOAP Feature (see [SOAP-Feature], Section 5) that provides 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 Feature described in R001 is available for a specific service or collection of services.
Requirement: A WSDL feature that describes the international context SOAP Feature described in R001.
Problem Statement: Service providers need a way to provide information about a specific instance of a locale-affected Web service will execute or to differentiate instances of the same service. For example, Binding A executes in French, Binding B executes in Japanese, and Binding C attempts to match the user's preferences.
Requirement: A WSDL feature that allows 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 the select the service and binding that most closely matches their needs or to tailor the operation of the service via header information). This feature 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. It 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 feature in R003, services must be able to indicate which available choice to use when invoking a service (request) or which choice was applied when the service actually executed (response).
Requirement: A SOAP Feature that describes the locale preferences the requester wished 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). One possible mechanism would be a standard extension to the proposed extension [ID-langtags] of RFC 3066 [RFC3066] that describes international preferences. Some of the items that such an extension would describe include:
Locales
Timezones
Collation Preferences
Problem Statement: Automatic discovery of Web services 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: Develop requirements for the discovery of Web services, including via non-W3C standards such as UDDI.