- From: William A. Nagy <nagy@watson.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 15:48:58 -0400
- To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
The Advertisement and Discovery of Services (ADS) mechanisms build upon existing technologies (XML, HTML, WSDL) to enable services providers to advertise the availability of their services to potential customers. ADS allows for service description information to be aggregated and made available in a well known location, as well as providing a method for creating direct links between content and related services. Both of these mechanisms allow for the harvesting of services information in a manner which should be familiar to the users/creators of today's web crawlers. In addition, it is easy to see how linking services directly to content can reduce the amount of work necessary to further automate many commonly occurring transactions on the Web. ADS does not preclude the use of a more structured directory system, such as UDDI, but instead complements it by providing another alternative by which services offerings can be announced. In fact, the ADS mechanisms could even be used to populate a UDDI node. Because ADS uses much of the same information that is contained within a UDDI entry, enabling services for discovery through the ADS mechanisms requires minimal additional work. The current version of the IBM Web Services Toolkit (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit), is enabled for ADS advertisement and discovery. The WSTK contains a limited version of a web crawler which understands how to harvest ADS related information, and all of the demos within the toolkit contain advertisements announcing their availability. The crawler works by traversing HTML pages, starting with those designated at its startup, looking for service advertisements. When it locates an advertisement, the crawler registers the newly discovered service description information with a running WSTK Service Broker. A more detailed description of ADS may be found in the ADS Whitepaper contained within the latest release of the IBM Web Services Toolkit. -Bill Nagy nagy@watson.ibm.com
Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 15:49:02 UTC