What Is This Change?

What we are talking about is a way of enabling applications to work transparently and cooperatively with each other across diverse computer-system/platform/operating-system/language environments. It is both a concept and a suite of Internet standards designed to enable Web-based program-to-program communications. We call it Web services.

The leader in bringing about this standardization is the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C. This organization consists of 60-plus researchers and engineers and over 500 member organizations (as well as individual contributors) who are helping to create Web standards for interoperability, access, semantics, trust, evolvability, decentralization, and multimedia. For more information on this standards body visit www.W3C.org.