Discovery Monitoring Authentication and Authorisation

SANY D2.3.4 Specification of the Sensor Service Architecture V3 Doc.V3.1 Copyright © 2007-2009 SANY Consortium Page 89 of 233

6.7.4 Discovery

Meta-information is extensively used for resource discovery and is described in detail in section 6.6.3. The conceptual meta-information model is defined in section 7.6.3. Typical examples of meta-information necessary for the support of the search functionality are keyword-lists, spatial-temporal information and bounding areas. Examples of meta-information for the purpose of navigation are descriptions of the content and structure of catalogue content. The discovery of services requires a specific meta-information model and dedicated query languages to access the meta-information entries. Meta-information may be semantically annotated in order to increase the quality and the recall of the discovery process. Note: For automatic service discovery meta-information based on semantic service descriptions e.g. OWL-S or WSMO could be provided. However, as there is not yet a generally accepted standard, semantic service specifications will not be considered in the scope of the SANY project.

6.7.5 Monitoring

According to section 6.6.2 monitoring is ap plied to the manageable components “sensor” and “service”. Meta-information for the purpose of monitoring includes status, actual load, usage statistics e.g. amount, quality, resolution and time span of downloaded data, used processing time, execution traces, etc. This meta-information is especially useful as input for composite services e.g. services resulting from service orchestration that rely on the data provided by other services. Furthermore, accounting applications that audit the usage of resources e.g. as a pre-requisite for billing rely on such monitoring information. Meta-information concerning accounting is a combination of the principal and some measure quota for resource usage.

6.7.6 Authentication and Authorisation

Authentication and authorisation rely on meta-information necessary for controlling the access to services and enforcing access control policies see section 6.8.2. Typical meta-information for the purpose of authentication includes the identifier of the principal that uniquely identifies the subject. For the purpose of authorisation, meta-information necessary to enable restriction of the usage of resources on a per-principal basis have to exist. An authorisation process is used to decide whether a principal is allowed to access a certain resource or not. This type of meta- information is directly related to the services implementing the authorisation paradigm and is of minimal or no relevance for anything else. A specific set of meta-information makes up the authorisation context that is used by an authorisation service to decide on the authorisation for a given request before allowing access to the requested service operations. SANY D2.3.4 Specification of the Sensor Service Architecture V3 Doc.V3.1 Copyright © 2007-2009 SANY Consortium Page 90 of 233

6.7.7 Quality control and management