OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new group to define a lightweight subset of the Web services protocol suite that will make it easy to find, share, and control devices on a network. The OASIS Web Services Discovery and Web Services Devices Profile (WS-DD) Technical Committee will enable printers, storage devices, sensors, building security devices, entertainment systems, energy management equipment, hand-held computers, cell phones, remote controls, and many other devices to be identified, communicated with, and controlled using Web services.

The OASIS WS-DD Technical Committee will base its work on contributions of the WS-Discovery, SOAP-over-UDP (User Datagram Protocol), and DPWS (Devices Profile for Web Services) specifications. Initially developed by a private group of software vendors, these specifications are already being deployed. It's estimated, for example, that at least 117 automation and audio-visual products from 37 different vendors currently support DPWS.

"WS-DD is complementary to standards such as UDDI, and it will help improve the scale and flexibility of applications through the improved dynamic discovery of devices such as smart phones and services that may not be connected." said Paul Lipton, Advisor and Senior Architect, Industry Standards and Open Source Program at CA.

Read the complete announcement.