Qualifier-based Access to Web-Services for Portal-to-Portal Communication

Web-services are frequently used for interaction among various portals. If a Web-service is accessible to one client, it will be accessible for the rest of the world as well, with a limited option of restrictions on access. In order to control the accessibility of a Web-service, we have proposed ´access logic´ to be incorporated within the same Web-architecture. The concept of access qualifiers has been integrated with defined policies and priorities. These may grant or revoke a certain type of access, like public, private, protected, limited or blocked, to a specific (group of) portal(s). The proposed strategy makes it possible to define the scope of a Web-service without modifications in the relevant standards. The access restrictions do not affect the operations provided by a Web-service. We have provided the complete concept and the implementation architecture for the proposed access control framework