Upcoming Articles in Web Services Journal ...

The first of two articles on Using Web Servics for Business in the Web Services Journal was published in November, the second will be published in December 2003. I'll update the second link when they are available. In the mean time here is the introduction to the second article ...

Using Web Services for Business - making yourself understood

If the content of a SOAP message is not understood or the recipient of a message does not know what to do with it when they get it, then using Web Services for Business, even with extensions for reliable delivery and security, will just not work.

To solve this problem you not only need to define how to "deliver the message" (see November’s article) you also need to define what the contents of a message mean as well as define what the recipient should do with a message when it is received. In other words, you need to define the message semantics.

This brings me to the purpose of this article which is to describe the different types of semantic definitions you need to create so that Web services can be used for business. It then describes the leading standards that are being developed to support the definition of semantics and suggests an architectural approach to solving the problem of handling multiple different semantic definitions.

More information ...

Both of these articles are based on ideas explained more fully in the Business Web Services Scorecard paper.