ANN: Language for Enabling Sites to be Inspected for the Presence of Web Services

The Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) specification
provides an XML format for assisting in the inspection of a site for
available services and a set of rules for how inspection related
information should be made available for consumption.  A WS-Inspection
document provides a means for aggregating references to pre-existing
service description documents which have been authored in any number
of formats (including, but not limited to, WSDL, HTML, etc.)  These
inspection documents are then made available at the point-of-offering
for the service, as well as through references which may be placed
within a content medium such as HTML.

The WS-Inspection specification provides a consolidation of concepts
found in ADS and DISCO (two earlier proposals in this space) and, in
conjunction with UDDI, attempts to address the full set of problems
associated with Web services discovery and description retrieval.

The WS-Inspection specification may be found at:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-wsilspec.html
or
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsrvspec/html/ws-inspection.asp

and implementations/tools/samples are available as part of IBM's Web
Services Toolkit v2.4.1 which may be found at:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit
or as part of Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net which may be found at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/code/default.asp?url=/code/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/026/002/541/msdncompositedoc.xml

-Bill Nagy
nagy@watson.ibm.com

Received on Friday, 2 November 2001 13:49:12 UTC