The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation of a web services application to deliver a calendar of events from the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) portal to County Extension web pages.
To provide a context for this work, the paper begins with background on AgNIC, an initiative of the USDA National Agricultural Library, land‐grant universities, and others, to build a portal to deliver agriculture‐related information and resources. Featured is the University of Arizona's (UA) contribution to AgNIC, Rangelands West, which has become a model of collaboration between land‐grant libraries and Cooperative Extension units. The UA first implemented web services to allow harvesting of Rangelands West metadata by the central AgNIC database. This experience provided the framework for further exploring this technology as a means for delivering customized content.
By instituting a service oriented architecture (SOA) using web services technologies (XML, WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP), developing a Master Service Bus to coordinate the application, and creating Flash plug‐ins and a Profile Manager for delivery, a calendar web service based on customer specifications was developed.
The paper discusses the implications for web services technology to offer new ways to share information and build stronger collaborations for delivering customized services
