Thu May 8, 3:35 AM ET Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News

The World Wide Web Consortium on Wednesday released a near-finished version of a core Web services specification. Soap 1.2, released to W3C members for final review, specifies the transport mechanism used in moving data between applications, regardless of the language or operating systems of the software. The review process is scheduled to end June 7.

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst for Web services research firm ZapThink LLC, said the release was important because it's the final step in a long process toward industry consensus, and because it resolved scores of interoperability issues not addressed in the previous 1.1 specification.

While industry giants, including Microsoft and IBM, have formed the Web Services Interoperability Organisation to settle such issues among vendors, Schmelzer feels addressing them within a standards body is better.

"Solving these issues in the specification definition process is the best route to go," he said. "The more ambiguities that are removed from the spec early on in the process, the better it will be for companies building products for the spec, and for enterprises implementing them."

Soap, or Simple Object Access Protocol, is a core standard in building Web services, along with XML and the Web Services Description Language. The W3C is responsible for the three standards, but two other important specifications--Web Services Security and Web Services Business Process Execution Language--have been submitted to another international standards body, the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis).

Soap is being used today in application-to-application communications, usually within a company, and to send data to users via a Web site or portal.

The latest version resolves more than 400 issues that weren't addressed in the previous specification, Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, said in a statement. "Starting today, developers who may have hesitated to pick up Soap 1.2 should take a look," he said.

The upgraded specification includes enhancements to make it easier to develop Web services using Soap toolkits. In addition, a message framework provides rules for constructing and processing Soap messages, and for specifying the exchange of messages between applications over underlying protocols, such as HTTP.

Soap 1.2 was developed by the W3C XML Protocol Working Group, which includes IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and BEA Systems.