 | Level: Advanced Contributors: IBM, Microsoft 01 Nov 2001
Updated Jan 2007 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.
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