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The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is a cross-industry project intended to accelerate the growth and release of interoperable Web services that would work on various platforms, applications, programming languages and computer systems across the Internet. The organization is open to companies that are interested in helping establish best practices for Web services. However, the organization does not set or create standards for Web services, but rather creates guidelines and tests the interoperability for existing standards, then makes recommendations based on the tests. The organization was founded through a proposal by Microsoft and IBM.
Techopedia Explains Web Services Interoperability Organization
The Web Services Interoperability Organization is an open industry organization which works to establish best practices rather than create new standards for Web service interoperability. The WS-I involves Web services leaders from different corporations and standards development organizations. They create profiles and support testing tools based on best practices for selected sets of Web services standards. The profiles and testing tools are then made available for anyone to use, particularly by the Web services community, in order to aid in the development and deployment of interoperable Web services.
A WS-I profile is a collection of named Web services specifications at specific revision levels collectively with the implementation and guidelines that would help advise how these may be used. However, since WS-I is not a certification authority, companies can simply claim that their products are WS-I compliant as long as they have used WS-I’s test tools. Though a company can falsely claim their compliance, it would be in their best interest not to because that would likely backfire on them in the future. Additionally, being interoperable with other Web services is already a benefit in itself.
WS-I is chartered to:
- Provide guidance and education regarding implementation and adoption of Web services in order to help customers
- Promote reliable and consistent Web services implementations across diverse systems
- Promote and articulate a common industry vision for Web services interoperability
