Applications that can serve as a consumer-subscriber and/or provider-publisher of Web data services include mobile computing, Web portals, enterprise portals, online business software, social media, and social networks.
[1] Web data services may support business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) information-sharing requirements.
Increasingly, enterprises are including Web data services in their SOA implementations, as they integrate mashup-style user-driven information sharing into business intelligence, business process management, predictive analytics, content management, and other applications, according to industry analysts.
To speed development of Web data services, enterprises can deploy technologies that ease discovery, extraction, movement, transformation, cleansing, normalization, joining, consolidation, access, and presentation of disparate information types from diverse internal sources (such as data warehouses and customer relationship management (CRM) systems) and external sources (such as commercial market data aggregators).
In addition to operating over the public Internet, Web data services may run solely within corporate intranets, or across B2B supply chains, or even span hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) or Cloud computing environments.