3. Technical services

Web services, described here as technical services, are the components that are essential to the smooth running of exchanges between services and applications on the Web. XML is used here for the following functions:

• describe and name services ;

• define service interactions with users ;

• secure and authenticate access to services ;

• express relationships between departments;

• classify and search for services in directories.

Each of these operations is codified in XML documents, each class of functions being associated with a specific set of tags by an appropriate DTD.

The most important standards for these technical Web services are :