JISC Information Environment Architecture

Notes on the JIE Architecture and Web Services

JISC IE UKOLN

This set of notes outlines the relationship between the JISC IE technical architecture and Web services.

As outlined in An introduction to Web Services, the Web services architecture comprises three component roles - service provider, service requestor and service registry. These three roles map quite cleanly onto the JISC IE architecture components, as shown below:

JISC IE architecture and Web services

All JISC IE components that offer services are service providers - this includes content providers, aggregators, brokers and all the JISC IE shared services.

All JISC IE components that connect to those services are service requestors - this includes portals, aggregators and brokers.

The JISC IE collection description service and service description service can jointly be thought of as providing a JISC IE directory. This combined service is the JISC IE service registry.

The key Web service technologies are the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration of Web Services (UDDI):