WS-Policy Framework

The Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) provides a general purpose model and syntax to describe and communicate the policies of a Web service. WS-Policy defines a policy to be a collection of one or more policy assertions. Some assertions specify traditional requirements and capabilities that will ultimately manifest on the wire (for example, authentication scheme and transport protocol selection). Some assertions specify requirements and capabilities that have no wire manifestation, yet are critical to proper service selection and usage (for example, privacy policy, QoS characteristics). WS-Policy provides a single policy grammar to allow both kinds of assertions to be reasoned about in a consistent manner.

WS-Policy is a standard developed by IBM, BEA, Microsoft, SAP, Sonic, and VeriSign.[1]