A typical problem of the research area on Service-Oriented Architectures is the composition of a set of existing services
with the aim of executing a complex task. The selection and composition of the services are based on a description of the
services themselves and can exploit an abstract description of their interactions. Interaction protocols (or choreographies)
capture the interaction as a whole, defining the rules that entities should respect in order to guarantee the interoperability;
they do not refer to specific services but they specify the roles and the communication among the roles. Policies (behavioral
interfaces in web service terminology), instead, focus on communication from the point of view of the individual services.
In this paper we present a preliminary study aimed to allow the use of public choreography specifications for generating executable
interaction policies for peers that would like to take part in an interaction. Usually the specifications capture only the
interactive behavior of the system as a whole. We propose to enrich the choreography by a set of requirements of capabilities that the parties should exhibit, where by the term “capability” we mean the skill of doing something or of
making some condition become true. Such capabilities have the twofold aim of connecting the interactive behavior to be shown
by the role-player to its internal state and of making the policy executable. A possible extension of WS-CDL with capability
requirements is proposed.
This research has partially been funded by the European Commission and by the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science
within the 6th Framework Programme project REWERSE number 506779 (cf. http://rewerse.net), and it has also been supported
by MIUR PRIN 2005 “Specification and verification of agent interaction protocols” national project.