Towards Collaborative Applications using Web Services

Consider an institutional service that could be defined by the countries government or board of education. Each participating college or university could later implement the service on a local basis. Users would discover the available services in a directory through some kind of search facility and develop front-end applications. Receiving the data in a standardized format allows the information of each participating institution to be integrated into existing applications without disrupting the normal look and feel that each user experiences on his own terminal.