Using Web Services to Interoperate Data at the FAO

Abstract

In this paper we present our experience of using Web services to support interoperability of data sources at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We describe the information bus architecture based on Web services to assist with multilingual access of data stored in various data sources and dynamic report generation. The architecture preserves the autonomy of the participating data sources and allows evolution of the system by adding and removing data sources. In addition, due to the characteristics of Web services of hiding implementation details of the services, and therefore, being able to be used independently of the hardware or software platform in which it is implemented, the proposed architecture supports the problem of existing different technologies widespread in the FAO, and alleviates the difficulty of imposing a single technology throughout the organization. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of our approach and the experience gained during the development of our architecture.