WS-I Organization (Web Services Interoperability)

The WS-I (Web Services Interoperability) Organization is an association of IT industry companies, including IBM and Microsoft, that aim to create Web services specifications that all companies can use. As of August 15, 2002, these specifications included:

• The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
• WS-Coordination
• WS-Transaction
• WS-Security

The WS set of specifications agreed upon by the WS-I Organization members are expected at some point to be proposed to one or more standards groups for official ratification. Current Web services standards (or de facto standards) include the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which provides a common industry mechanism for transmitting a request to a Web service and returning a response; Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), which allows a company to publicize its services to other companies and Web users; and Web Services Description Language (WSDL, which enables a business to formally describe what its service does.