Problem Statement: Service providers and services need information about the locale, language preference, time zone, or other international preferences (such as currency, collation, etc.) of the requester.

Requirement: A SOAP Feature (see , Section 5) that provides the Web service provider international context information (such as locale, language, or other culturally linked preferences) about the requester and which the provider can use to tailor the language, invocation, or operation of services or the operation of the provider (such as language selection in the generation of Faults and so forth).

Problem Statement: Service providers need to indicate that the SOAP Feature described in R001 is available for a specific service or collection of services.

Requirement: A WSDL feature that describes the international context SOAP Feature described in R001.

Problem Statement: Service providers need a way to provide information about a specific instance of a locale-affected Web service will execute or to differentiate instances of the same service. For example, Binding A executes in French, Binding B executes in Japanese, and Binding C attempts to match the user's preferences.

Requirement: A WSDL feature that allows a service to describe a "locale execution policy" for a service or a binding of a service, including any additional derived information of interest to users of the service (allowing users the select the service and binding that most closely matches their needs or to tailor the operation of the service via header information). This feature must allow services to describe one or more languages or locales available for a specific service and allow for a runtime user choice (language/locale negotiation) when that is appropriate. It must also provide a way to indicate that a specific service always executes using specific international settings or returns data in a specific language.

Problem Statement: Given the WSDL feature in R003, services must be able to indicate which available choice to use when invoking a service (request) or which choice was applied when the service actually executed (response).

Requirement: A SOAP Feature that describes the locale preferences the requester wished to have applied to a service (in a request) or which were actually applied to a service by the provider (in a response) as described in the Web service description defined in R003. This mechanism may be the same as in R001.

Problem Statement: Although there exist standards for identifying languages and language preferences on the Web, there are no standards for identifying locales or certain other international preferences. These data structures are of interest in enabling Web services and other Web applications for multi-lingual or global operation.

Requirement: A standard for identifying platform neutral international preferences (that is, locale identifiers). One possible mechanism would be a standard extension to the proposed extension of RFC 3066 that describes international preferences. Some of the items that such an extension would describe include:

Problem Statement: Automatic discovery of Web services needs to allow users to find the same service in multiple languages and to find services that will meet their specific language or locale requirements.

Requirement: Develop requirements for the discovery of Web services, including via non-W3C standards such as UDDI.