News: Web services look for common ground
The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), a consortium of companies working to make emerging Web services products compatible, said it has published its Basic Profile Working Draft to its Web site. ( http://www.ws-i.org/Profiles/Basic/2002-10/BasicProfile-1.0-WGD.htm )

Web services is a conception of how to build software so that companies with different computing systems can interact and conduct transactions. Most major software makers, and a growing number of large companies, have adopted Web services as a way to build business software. But for systems to interact on a large scale, developers need to agree on which specifications to follow and how to use them.

The draft spells out how existing standards, including the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) 2.0, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 and XML Schema, should be used to develop interoperable Web services.
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