Organizations are investing considerable resources in Web services, an approach that comprises a set of platform-neutral technologies designed to ease the delivery of services over intranets and the Internet. Web services enable interoperability via a set of open standards, including XML to provide information about the data in a document to users on various platforms; the simple object access protocol (SOAP) for cross-platform interapplication communication; the Web Services Description Language to describe online services; and the universal description, discovery, and integration protocol to find available Web services on the Internet or corporate networks.