Web Service

A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services are differentiated from other services by the use of SOAP-formatted XML envelopes and their associated WSDL descriptions.

For further information on Web services, visit http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

An XML-based protocol that consists of three parts:

• An envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it
• A set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types
• A convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses

For further information on the SOAP protocol, visit http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/.

WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

An XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services).

Globally Unique Identifier (GUID)

A GUID is a unique reference number used as an identifier in each web service request.