WS-I is a global industry organization committed to promoting consistent and reliable interoperability among Web services across platforms, applications and programming languages. The organization unites a diverse community of Web services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices, and supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services. Since its formation in February 2002, more than 170 companies have joined WS-I, including large and small software vendors.

In August, 2003, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), released the Basic Profile 1.0. The Basic Profile consists of implementation guidelines recommending how a set of core Web services specifications (SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, HTTP 1.1, XML 1.0 and XML Schema) should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. These guidelines address technologies that cover the following areas:

* Messaging: the exchange of protocol elements, usually over a network, to affect a Web service

* Description: the enumeration of the messages associated with a Web service, along with implementation details

* Discovery: metadata that enables the advertisement of a Web service's capabilities

* Security: mechanisms that provide integrity and privacy

In delivering the Basic Profile, WS-I resolved more than 200 interoperability issues associated with using the core Web services specifications together. In this technical session, Chris Ferris, chair of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Group, and a senior technical staff member of IBM's Emerging E-Business Industry Architecture group, will dive into the technical aspects of the Basic Profile, including the design goals and challenges, clarifications to the base Web services specifications, usage conventions and restrictions, testing and conformance.