Web services and virtual communities

With escalating need for global and flexible interactions in increasingly networked society, virtual communities as a new model are becoming important for virtual communication and collaboration. From a technical perspective, the communicative and collaborative functionalities of virtual communities mostly consist of standard components, modules, and tools. These software components and functionalities increasingly come in a form of Web services discovered and invoked via the Internet. This article discusses what Web services are, why Web services are important, and where they are going. In addition, we are also going to look at Web service architecture, standards, advantages, development platforms, and semantic Web.