Common in both the field and the terminology is the assumption that there is also a machine readable description of the operations supported by the server, often referred to as a Web Services Description Language (WSDL). WSDL: An XML document that allows service interfaces to be described, along with the details of their bindings to specific protocols. Directory services are not relevant or included in the current implementation of this API. The specifications that define Web Services are intentionally modular, and as a result there is no one document that contains them all.

The definition encompasses many different systems, but in common usage and throughout this document the term refers to clients and servers that communicate using XML messages that follow the SOAP or REST standards. Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a Web service. There are a few "core" specifications that are supplemented by others as the circumstances and technologies dictate, including: SOAP: An XML-based, extensible message envelope format, with "bindings" to underlying protocols. This API includes one WSDL document per namespace.Web Services can be defined as software designed to support interoperable Machine-to-Machine interaction over a network. Web Services are frequently Web APIs that can be accessed over the Internet and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. UDDI: A directory service for publishing and discovering metadata about Web Services to enable applications to find Web Services either at design time or runtime.

Typically used to generate server and client code, and for configuration. Most of these core specifications have come from W3C, including XML, SOAP, and WSDL; UDDI comes from OASIS. The primary protocols are HTTP and HTTPS, Zhuji Guanghui Machinery although bindings for others, including SMTP and XMPP, have been written. Additionally, there is neither a single, nor a stable set of specifications.NET SOAP frameworks. The latter is not a requirement of SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in the mainstream Java and .