NISS announces new Web services for remote apps use

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NISS has announced the creation of NISS Web Services as a service and example to the statistical sciences community.

Web services are an exciting new form of distributed computing that allow users to invoke remote applications nearly transparently. More important, Web services enable users to write their own client software on the basis of a publicly distributed Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document describing the service. One of many Web services primers is available at http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/08/07/webservices.html.

NISS Web Services will be hosted at the URL http://www.niss-webservices.org. (dg.o editor's note: As of July 1, this URL is inoperative.) As they are developed, new NISS Web Services will be announced on the NISS Web site, at http://www.niss.org/WebServices/webservices.html.

The initial NISS Web Service, developed under the auspices of the Digital Government project, is NISS WebSwap, which swaps one or more attributes (fields) between user-specified records in a microdata file, uploading the original data file from the user's computer and downloading the file containing the swapped records.

The WSDL documentation for NISS WebSwap is included with the downloadable NISS WebSwap distribution, together with a NISS-developed client and demonstration files, or can be downloaded separately. Information and downloads for NISS WebSwap are on the NISS Web site, at http://www.niss.org/WebServices/dg/WebSwap.html.

Ashish Sanil, Research Statistician at NISS, is the principal architect and developer of NISS Web Services. Shanti Gomatam, Adrian Dobra and Alan Karr contributed to development of NISS WebSwap.