web service

The W3C defines a Web service (many sources also capitalize the second word, as in Web Services) as "a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network." Web services are frequently just Web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.
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<standard, programming, software> A business and technology term encompassing the possibility of openly working with other business, developers, and programs through publicly-available open APIs.
See UDDI, WSDL, Simple Object Access Protocol.
W3C Web Services Activity.
(2002-06-28)