Web Services

Abstract

This paper presents Web Services and their relations to pragmatic
present day and near future business networking applications. One of the
most intensive research areas in academia is the emerging next
generation web. This research studies the ways to add intelligence to
the present day web by introducing new ways of describing the data and
services residing on the web with data of data so-called metadata. This
data can be used to describe the content, purpose and means of use of
both data and services. These descriptions could then be used by
artificial intelligence solutions, such as autonomous agents, to produce
search engines with better hit rates through application of semantics
and to enable automatic location and usage of services.

The part of research and applications that is related to services is
often referred as Web Services. This paper gives an introduction to the
topic and relates it to electronic business networking which is of the
top research fields in business economics. Then we will move on and
introduce the eBusiness standards briefly and sketch out the development
trends in business networking and it's information technology support.
Next we will cover the application areas for the web services followed
by some introductory examples of the existing technologies such as
Simple Object

Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). Finally we will
cover some proposed future visions and draw conclusions of our study.