XML STANDARDS BODY OASIS this week created a technical committee to build a standard for Web services to be used with portals, dubbed the Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) technical committee. The group is working on a standard that will enable the plug-and-play of visual Web services into portals or other Web applications, according to Billerica, Mass.-based OASIS. The goal is that once a WSRP service is listed in a public directory, users will be able to locate and integrate that service into their portals without manually adapting their portal or related applications. The committee consists of portal vendors, such as Plumtree, Documentum and Epicentric, as well as Web services infrastructure providers, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Iona and SilverStream. Although Microsoft is not part of the committee, the standard is being designed to enable remote portlet Web services to be implemented with either J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) or Microsoft’s .Net platform for building Web services. Additionally, WSRP will be built on the current de facto core of Web services protocols: UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and XML. Software Development