Focused on Web Services, the opening keynote session from the fourth Forum XML in Paris showed a mismatch between a need for information integration and the current orientation of Web Services toward application integration.

Highlighting developments since last year, Frank Gilbane described a general move of focus from computing to communication as organizations are increasingly concerned by using their computing power and budget to communicate rather than just "perform operations." He concluded that "Enterprise Information Integration" is becoming more important than "Enterprise Application Integration."

Even though Gilbane affirmed that Web Services would be a key technology in this evolution, the next keynote speaker, Jean-Marie Chauvet gave an analysis of the motivations behind Web Services, showing a clear bias toward RPC like applications better fitted to application integration than information integration.

This mismatch, clear when comparing the presentations of these two speakers echoes a debate kicked off by Roger Costello last month on XML-DEV wondering what SOAP could bring to information interchange over XML document exchanges using more traditional protocols and infrastructure.