What is meant by WS-*?
That's the name of a set of standards related to web services by the W3C.
http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/
They're important because web services, by their very nature, need standards to interoperate between platforms.
The Web Service stack. There are a bunch of specifications for Web Services, and there names are written WS-whatever, for example: WS-SecurityPolicy. The * is used as a wildcard to indicate that you are referring to the Web Services stack.
WS-* is shorthand for the the myriad of specifications that are used for web service messaging.
Some of the services are:
- WS-Security
- WS-SecureConversation
- WS-Federation
- WS-Authorization
- WS-Policy
- WS-Trust
- WS-Privacy
- WS-Test
There is a lot of information to digest, depending on what you need. Here's a list of the specifications on Wikipedia.