Exploring privacy issues in Web services discovery/agencies

The increasing discussions concerning Web services privacy often neglect a key building block of the Web services architecture: discovery agencies. This overview of discovery agency privacy issues highlights the various challenges and proposes different technical approaches for addressing them.

Web Services Overview

There are three major entities in the Web services model: •

A provider is the person or organization that provides an appropriate Web service for a particular business purpose.

•

A requestor is a person or organization that seeks to use a provider's Web service to meet business requirements.

•

A broker, or discovery agency, acts as a matchmaker between the Web services provider and requestor.