I am so thrilled to inform you that Web Services Policy Member Submission was acknowledged by W3C today. Nineteen companies participated in the submission.
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2006/06/
http://www.w3.org/Submission/WS-Policy/
http://www.w3.org/Submission/WS-PolicyAttachment/
Adobe Systems, BEA Systems, CA, Ericcson, IBM, IONA, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft, Ricoh Company, Nokia, Oracle, SAP AG, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems, Systinet, TIBCO Software, VeriSign webMethods and WSO2 co-submitted WS-Policy and WS-Policy specifications to the World Wide Web Consortium.
Web Services Policy is a major component of the WS-* architecture. Web Services Policy defines how to express capabilities, requirements and general characteristics of a Web Service in an interoperable form (XML Information Set). It also describes mechanisms for associating policies with Web Service constructs such as endpoint, operation and message.
Web Services Policy is used to convey the conditions for an interaction between a Web service requestor and a Web service provider. Conditions for an interaction may include security, reliability, transaction, message optimization, etc. As such, Web Services Policy is a foundation for enabling secure, reliable and transacted Web Services.
At Microsoft, I am a technical diplomat and responsible for standardizing and building industry momentum around Web Services Policy. For this submission, I had the pleasure of working with Jeffrey Schlimmer, Daniel Roth, Kyle Young, Kirill Gavrylyuk, Jorgen Thelin and policy representatives from BEA, IBM, SAP, Sonic Software and VeriSign.