This week IBM, CA, and Talking Blocks submitted the WS-Manageability specification to the OASIS WSDM technical committee. Because most of the writing I've been doing for InfoWorld has focused on the WS intermediary space, manageability has been a topic I've though a lot about. Most intermediary products make as much noise about their ability to manage Web services as they do about their ability to provide proxy services like security and logging.

The WS-Manageability specification defines the ideas of manageability topics and management aspects.

A topic covers the functional capability that supports management of a particular problem or management domain...The functional capability of a topic is described using as combination of three aspects: properties, operations, and events.

The five topics identified in the specification are:

1. Identification - provides the capability to uniquely identify the resource under management.
2. State - provides the capability to manage the operational state of the resource under management.
3. Configuration - provides the capability to manage the collection of properties that affect the behavior of the resource under management.
4. Metrics - provides the capability to manage important metrics, the raw, atomic, unambiguous, quantifiable data about the resource under management.
5. Relationships - provides the capability to query the associations that the resource under management participates in with other resources.

The three three aspects of manageability are:

1. Properties - the publicly exposed state of the resource.
2. Operations - the methods that the resource supports.
3. Events - information which describes state changes within the resource.

The specification goes on to describe these in great detail. The group also submitted a concepts document which contains some very good discussions of Web services in general and a representation document that contains the XML definitions for the specification.