Web data services refers to
service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided ...
(SOA) applied to data sourced from the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
and the Internet as a whole. Web data services enable maximal mashup, reuse, and sharing of
structured data
A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be co ...
(such as relational tables), semi-structured information (such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents), and
unstructured information
Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...
(such as
RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...
feeds, content from
Web applications
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
, commercial data from online business sources).
In a Web data services environment, applications may subscribe to and consume information, provide and publish information for others to consume, or both. Applications that can serve as a consumer-subscriber and/or provider-publisher of Web data services include
mobile computing
Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...
,
Web portal
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displa ...
s,
enterprise portals
An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP), is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries in a manner similar to the more general web portals. Enterprise portals p ...
, online
business software
Business software (or a business application) is any software or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, measure productivity, and perf ...
,
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...
, and
social networks
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...
. Web data services may support business-to-consumer (
B2C
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) or business-to-consumer (B2C) is the business model of selling products directly to customers and thereby bypassing any third-party retailers, wholesalers, or any other middlemen. Direct-to-consumer sales are usually tr ...
) and business-to-business (
B2B) information-sharing requirements. Increasingly, enterprises are including Web data services in their SOA implementations, as they integrate mashup-style user-driven information sharing into
business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...
,
business process management
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business ...
,
predictive analytics
Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.
In busin ...
,
content management
Content management (CM) is a set of processes and technologies that supports the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...
, and other applications, according to industry analysts.
To speed development of Web data services, enterprises can deploy technologies that ease discovery, extraction, movement, transformation, cleansing, normalization, joining, consolidation, access, and presentation of disparate information types from diverse internal sources (such as data warehouses and
customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.
CRM systems compile data from a r ...
(CRM) systems) and external sources (such as commercial market data aggregators). Web data services build on industry-standard protocols, interfaces, formats, and integration patterns, such as those used for SOA, Web 2.0, Web-Oriented Architecture, and
Representational State Transfer (REST). In addition to operating over the public Internet, Web data services may run solely within corporate intranets, or across B2B supply chains, or even span hosted software-as-a-service (
SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
SaaS is co ...
) or
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over m ...
environments.
What Is WOA? It's The Future of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
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See also
* Data Integration
Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them.
This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (such as when two similar companies ...
* Data Virtualization Data virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve and manipulate data without requiring technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted at source, or where it is physically located, and can pr ...
* Web data integration Web data integration (WDI) is the process of aggregating and managing data from different websites into a single, homogeneous workflow. This process includes data access, transformation, mapping, quality assurance and fusion of data. Data that is s ...
References
Web services
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