Towards Web Services-based Collaborative Design

These days, Web services have emerged as a promising technology, and may be used in the field of collaborative design. In this paper, we examine Web services as both a XML-based approach and a service-driven approach to collaborative design. Since Web services are a service-oriented architecture (SOA) more than a set of technologies, it could be used not only at the technology level, but also at the SOA level, which may be more appropriate recur to the concept of peer-to-peer. Correspondingly, two prototypes are illustrated for further demonstration, and a possible scenario of the latter one is provided as a reference. A preliminary attempt to add semantics to services is also presented to facilitate the interoperability of Web services-based collaborative design