WS-Workspace: Workspace Versioning for Web Services

Abstract

When using web services to perform complex data manipulations, users and administrators need control over how their changes are managed and seen by other clients of the service. This includes support for undo of changes, batch publishing of many changes, 'what if' analysis, the collaboration of several people in making and approving a complex change, workspace based access control, and the auditing and tracking of changes. We propose taking the workspace versioning model, used extensively in CAD and CASE products, and using it to augment web services in a backward compatible way based on the WS-Coordination protocol. The resulting protocol, which we call WS-Workspace, facilitates the writing of web services that support applications with undo, collaboration, and auditing.