Web services - what do they mean to Web-based education?

Although many Web-based educational systems are available on the Web, very few of them can share their components with others and building a new system can rarely reuse existing components. Making two components developed in different languages and on different platforms work together requires a lot of work. This paper describes a means for making educational components interoperable and reusable on the Web by using Web Services. In this way developing a Web-based educational system becomes less tedious and more efficient.