ScreamingMedia Joins WSRP Working Group

Online/Offline content syndicator ScreamingMedia Inc. is throwing its weight behind a growing XML interoperability group that promotes plug-and-play ideals for Web services between businesses.

The New York-based company has joined the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) Technical Committee. The Boston-based group works to promote interoperability of XML schema for Web services. The goal is to help businesses pipe content or applications into plug-and-play portals that allow end-user business portals to then “consume” them, easily.

ScreamingMedia is already in the business of building applications that pipe content to a variety of Internet-based platforms and devices that deploy XML protocols. With its announcement to join the WSRP working group, the content aggregator is telegraphing that its database infrastructure products also support the open standards SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol .

The SOAP support means ScreamingMedia clients can integrate their data platforms (which ScreamingMedia builds from over 3,000 sources) with portal platforms built by companies such as BEA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle, Plumtree, Citrix, BroadVision, and ATG.

To join the WSRP technical committee is to also support universal database protocols that are the underpinnings of emerging Web services infrastructure: UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) , the XML-based worldwide business registry.

The standards the WSRP group is working on with the plug and play remote portals will also be implemented in the Java J2EE and Microsoft Corp.’s .NET platforms.

Members of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee include currently include Bowstreet, Divine, Documentum, Epicentric, Factiva, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Interwoven, IONA, Oracle Corp., Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, Reuters and SilverStream Software.

“We are happy to have ScreamingMedia on board,” said Thomas Schaeck, chair of the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portals Technical Committee. “We see user-facing, interactive web services providing a variety of content as an important application for WSRP and therefore believe that ScreamingMedia’s expertise in providing content-rich Web services will be very helpful in defining the standard.”

ScreamingMedia has long been active in a number of industry groups to form common schema for exchanging metadata on XML protocols. For example, Alan Karben, the vice president of product design at ScreamingMedia, chairs the SportsML working group, which is working on common language for piping sports metadata to a variety of devices and platforms.