The W3C is holding a workshop on web services, in order to gather information on future directions the W3C should take past the point of their XML Protocol work.

Announcing the workshop, Hugo Haas explained:

Since the start of this [XML Protocol] work, Members have expressed interest in expanding the scope to also cover other aspects of an XML-based distributed application environment, such as Web service descriptions. ... The goal of the workshop is to advise the W3C about which further actions (Activity Proposals, Working Groups, etc.) should be taken with regard to Web services.

Topics under discussion are likely to include reliable messaging, security, privacy of data, transactions, interface definition languages, service discovery, service descriptions, message and protocol semantics, and development environments for web services.

The workshop will take place April 11-12th 2001 in San Jose, CA, USA.