A web service enables machine-to-machine communication by providing a standardized way to use interfaces from remote systems. Therefore, data is exchanged and functions are called up on remote computers. Each web service has a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which uniquely identifies it. Furthermore, each web service has an interface description, the so called web service API (application programming interface) which describes all provided functionalities and defines how to interact with the web service.

Web services can be implemented in different ways. The most common are:

• REST-APIs (Representational State Transfer) and
• SOAP-Services (Simple Object Access Protocol).

The DACHSER web services follow the REST paradigm as it offers more flexibility to the web service consumer. Additionally in contrast to SOAP, all request parameters are contained in the query or in the request header section.

The web service response is an optimized XML or JSON structure without any overhead.