Version 3

    By promoting interoperability and encouraging an open forum for discussion, W3C commits to leading the technical evolution of the Web. In just ten years, W3C has developed more than eighty technical specifications for the Web's infrastructure. However, the Web is still young and there is still a lot of work to do, especially as computers, telecommunications, and multimedia technologies converge. To meet the growing expectations of users and the increasing power of machines, W3C is already laying the foundations for the next generation of the Web. W3C's technologies will help make the Web a robust, scalable, and adaptive infrastructure for a world of information.

     

    WS-Addressing Working Group

     

    The purpose of the Web Services Addressing Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, is to produce a W3C Recommendation for Web Services Addressing by refining the W3C Member Submission "WS-Addressing" based on consideration of the importance of this component in the Web Services architecture, implementation experience, and interoperability feedback. WS-Addressing defines how message headers direct messages to a service or agent, provides an XML format for exchanging endpoint references, and defines mechanisms to direct replies or faults to a specific location.

     

    WS-Choreography Description Language Working Group

     

    Business transactions, especially those envisioned by Web services, grow from complex interactions. These interactions can be viewed from a variety of points in the transaction chain, not simply the start or the expected endpoint. Modeling these interactions from a global viewpoint allows software developers to take into account the distributed race conditions (unexpected dependence on the sequence of events) that may exist�in much the same way they exist in non-Web business processes. Choreography provides the set of rules that explains how different components may act together, and in what sequence, giving a flexible systemic view of the process.

     

    The Web Services Choreography Description Language is a necessary complement to end point languages such as BPEL and Java. WS-CDL provides them with the global model they need to ensure that end point behavior�the "rules of engagement"�is consistent across cooperating services.

     

    Web Services Description Working Group

     

    The Web Services Description Language provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services. WSDL enables one to separate the description of the abstract functionality offered by a service from concrete details of a service description such as �how� and �where� that functionality is offered. The working group is defining a language for describing the abstract functionality of a service as well as a framework for describing the concrete details of a service description. It also defines the conformance criteria for documents in this language.

     

    Web Services Resource Access Working Group

     

    The Web Services Resource Access (WS-RA) specifications define SOAP-based mechanisms for interacting with the XML representation behind a resource-oriented Web Service, accessing metadata related to that service, as well as a mechanism to subscribe to events related to that resource. WS-Transfer defines the basic Create, Get, Put, Delete operations against resource-oriented Web Service data. WS-Fragment enhances these operations, extending WS-Transfer with the addition of fragment access. WS-Enumeration provides a protocol that allows a resource to provide a context, called an enumeration context, to a consumer that represents a logical cursor through a sequence of data items. WS-Eventing and WS-EventDescriotions allowinterested parties to subscribe to a series of notifications from a resource oriented Web Service. WS-MetadataExchange defines a mechanism by which metadata about a Web Service can be retrieved. WS-SOAPAssertions defines WS-Policy assertions that can be used to advertise the requirement to use a certain version of SOAP in message exchanges.