A Generic Charging Policy Based Accounting for Web Services

Abstract

Problem statement: Metering and charging are basic accounting functions that are essential for commercial usage of web services. Current charging and accounting schemes primarily involve users being charged flat or based on the connection/session time. Accounting management of web services should provide for metering, charging, accounting, billing, payment and auditing. We have extended our earlier work, a Policy based Accounting for Web Services (WS-PACT), to develop a generic and comprehensive charging policy that can cater to different charging patterns. WS-PACT provides a flexible model to meet the varying billing and payment needs of service providers. Approach: Policies are expressed in WS-Policy and policy query facility has been developed using XQuery. Results: Users can use the query facility to obtain the charges being levied and can decide on which services to use by taking into account their preferred spending limits and payment patterns. Conclusion: We have implemented and tested the charging policy and query facility with a sample application.

Establishing Payment Hubs—Unwind the Spaghetti?

“…According to the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) approach, web services have to be re-usable, interoperable and business-context specific [9]. The design and implementation approach for accounting and billing related web services-especially focusing on the payment area within the corporate world-has been analyzed by MuthuLakshmi [10]. The design and implementation of a privacy preserved off-premises cloud data storage with focus on the healthcare and payment card industry has been already evaluated and could be a solution for security related concerns and issues for the transactional payment area [11].…”