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The WS-Inspection specification provides an XML format for assisting in the inspection of a site for available services and a set of rules for how inspection related information should be made available for consumption. A WS-Inspection document provides a means for aggregating references to pre-existing service description documents which have been authored in any number of formats. These inspection documents are then made available at the point-of-offering for the service as well as through references which may be placed within a content medium such as HTML.
Specifications have been proposed to describe Web Services at different levels and from various perspectives. It is the goal of the proposed Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to describe services at a functional level. The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) schema aims at providing a more business-centric perspective. What has not yet been provided by these proposed standards is the ability to tie together, at the point of offering for a service, these various sources of information in a manner which is both simple to create and use. the WS-Inspection specification addresses this need by defining an XML grammar which facilitates the aggregation of references to different types of service description documents, and then provides a well defined pattern of usage for instances of this grammar. By doing this, the WS-Inspection specification provides a means by which to inspect sites for service offerings.
Repositories already exist where descriptive information about Web services has been gathered together. The WS-Inspection specification provides mechanisms with which these existing repositories can be referenced and utilized, so that the information contained in them need not be duplicated if such a duplication is not desired.
| Description | Date | Access method |
|---|---|---|
| Web Services Inspection Language specification (PDF, 96KB) | November 2001 | HTTP download |
| Inspection Schema (XML, 5KB) | January 2007 | HTTP download |
| UDDI Schema (XML, 4KB) | January 2007 | HTTP download |
| UDDI V2 Schema (XML, 4KB) | January 2007 | HTTP download |
| WSDL Schema (XML, 3KB) | January 2007 | HTTP download |
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