DB2 and Web services

The World Wide Web offers a tremendous amount of information. Accessing and integrating the available information is a challenge. "Screen scraping" and reverse template engineering are manual and error-prone integration techniques from the past. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) allowed Web sites to become programmable Web services. W3C SOAP is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) and is a lightweight protocol that provides a service-oriented architecture for applications on the Web. Clients compose requests and send SOAP envelopes to providers, who reply through SOAP responses. In this paper, we describe DB2® and Web services, with techniques for integrating information from multiple Web service providers and exposing the collective information through Web services.