The Service Description attribute defines a running web service at a distinct protocol endpoint. It is defined when you configure Resource Offerings for Bootstrapping. Information about service instances needs to be communicated in various contexts. For example, the Discovery Service defined is an identity service which provides an enumeration of resource offerings (each of which includes a service instance description).
This attribute is where authentication methods supported by the Discovery Service are added. These security mechanisms refer to the way a web service consumer authenticates to the web service provider or provides message-level security. By default, all available methods that the service instance supports are selected. If an authentication method is not selected, and a web services consumer sends a request using that method, the request is rejected. See Supported Authentication Mechanisms.
The value of this attribute is the URL of the SOAP-over-HTTP endpoint. The URI scheme must be HTTP or HTTPS as in https://soap.profile-provider.com/soap.
The value of this optional attribute is the equivalent of the wsdlsoap:soapAction attribute of the wsdlsoap:operation element in the service's concrete WSDL-based description.