### Web Services

The Web Services module is the OpenSSO implementation of the Liberty Alliance Project Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) specifications. The ID-WSF builds upon the Liberty Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF) by providing specifications to build web services that retrieve, update, or perform an action on, identity data in a federated network environment. The specifications outline the technical components necessary to build web services, such as a calendar service, a wallet service, or an alert service.

Note – Identity data includes, but is not limited to, attributes that define first name, last name, home address, business address, and an emergency contact.

Web services are the basis of distributed computing across the Internet. A web service consumer (WSC) locates a web service and invokes the operations it provides by making a request. A web service provider (WSP) is the application implementing the web service based on the request; it can be on the same Java™ virtual machine as the WSC, or it can be thousands of miles away. When a WSC needs to retrieve identity attributes from a WSP, it must first contact a discovery service to locate where the particular attributes are stored. When this information is returned, the WSC then contacts the WSP (for example, a personal profile service) to retrieve the necessary attributes.

The Web Services module in the OpenSSO console provides an interface for configuring the following:

- Liberty Personal Profile Service

- Discovery Service

- SOAP Binding Service

- Authentication Web Service