Web services standard
IBM, BEA Systems, SAP and Microsoft have published a draft specification for web services which aims to tackle how users'...
Metadata is used to describe what applications need to know to interact with a specific web service. The draft WS-Metadata Exchange specification aims to provide a way for applications or web services to communicate with other web services.
According to Microsoft's MSDN developer website, the specification enables a service to provide metadata through a web services interface. With WS-Metadata Exchange, a potential user can access a set of functions to retrieve the metadata that describes the service. This information can be used at design time when developing applications, or at runtime, when the application is being used.
