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I.IV. Background
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## I.IV. Background

Web Services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms. Interoperability is achieved by using standard communication protocols that are platform neutral such as HTTP and XML to transport messages through the Internet. SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol, is the main specification that describes how messages should be packaged in XML format. SOAP was submitted to the W3C in 2000 by IBM, Microsoft, UserLand, and Developmentor. Other specifications work hand-in-hand with SOAP to provide complementary features such as WSDL (Web Service Description Language) to describe the interfaces and their bindings to communication protocols. And, UDDI (Universal Detection Discovery and Integration) to provide a registry service for service providers.

WS-I.org is the organization taking the responsibility of ensuring interoperability between the different Web Services implementations. In 2006, the organization published the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1, and this is the version that STAR is basing its web services guidelines on. The Basic Profile is based on the SOAP 1.1 specifications and describes SOAP bindings for HTTP only at this time. Bindings to other protocols such as TCP and SMTP are starting to emerge and might be included in a future version of the specifications.

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