Maurits van der Vlugt, a GIS specialist with large consulting firm Sinclair Knight Merz, hired to head up the project, says the goal is to convince emergency services teams to embrace software that can interoperate with web services in their command centres.

"What we want to get across is, 'Yes, this is an innovative approach, but it's no longer lab experimental stuff. It's available off the shelf now and requires organisation to take it up'," van der Vlugt says.

For years, web services have been touted as the magic glue that would let applications talk to each other through the jungle of disparate systems.

Every year, the hype moves closer to reality, but finding an adequate definition of web services is still tricky.

Broadly speaking, web services are the software industry's most recent attempt to let their applications communicate with and use each other in a standardised way, regardless of hardware or software platforms.

It's at least up there among the top three technologies this decade in terms of importance to this industry, says S2 Intelligence analyst Bruce McCabe, who describes web services as "commoditisation" of software integration.

Web services conform to the software building philosophy behind service-orientated architecture (SOA) that aims to make software code modular and reusable both inside and outside the enterprise.

For example, IBM Software Group information technology architect Ritchie Hale says that a major debit card validation company has offered banks and debit card providers around the world access its transaction validation system as a web service.

Similarly, van der Vlugt says fire managers could use live web services operated by the meteorological and geospatial data custodians to help manage their crews during bushfires.

Work to establish the new architecture began a little more than five years ago, when IBM and Microsoft agreed to collaborate on XML-based protocols to allow their software to communicate over HTTP, the network standard underpinning the worldwide web.

Since then, the standards have matured into a sophisticated set of specification that have gained the allegiance of almost all of the industry's major enterprise software vendors such as SAP, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.

Overseen by two key standards bodies, Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and the Web Services Interoperability group - part of the World Wide Web consortium - they include SOAP, UDDI and a range of smaller protocols designed for specific business processes, such as security and financial transactions.

Aside from a number of open source products, Sun Microsystem's Java-based J2EE and Microsoft's .NET are currently the two main commercial application programming languages used to develop web services compliant software.

However, research conducted by Forrester found Microsoft was the only significant provider for its platform - J2EE provides the foundation for BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP's application server platforms.

Web services didn't escape the hype that characterised the dotcom era that spawned it. At the time, it was seen as a panacea to the software industry problems, such as poor software interoperability and monopolistic practices.

Expectations that web services will lay a path to a lucrative software cottage industry focused on business processes still linger.

But the reality is different. At least in the early days, bickering hampered standards development and consolidation in the one-stop-shop enterprise server application market. And it is showing no signs of abating.

Still, there is some evidence that take up of web services is moving beyond the experimental early adoption phase and beginning to accelerate.

Two years ago, McCabe said there were 300 major implementations of web services, now he says it would be difficult to walk into a major Australian organisation and not find some use of the technology.

Gartner vice-president and research director Dion Wiggins agrees web services are becoming more commonplace in enterprises.

The worldwide market for application integration, middleware and portal software rose almost 6 per cent to reach $US6.7 billion ($8.7 billion) during 2004, the analyst group says.

Sarv Girn, the Commonwealth Bank's general manager of strategy and architecture, says web services are becoming more common as the technology evolves.

"They're certainly maturing now in terms of becoming standard IT development practice, because there are significant benefits to be had," Girn says.

National Oceans Office chief information officer Kim Finney heads up an ambitious project to pool Australia's national marine data resources behind a single information portal, which relies heavily on web services.

"I think 12 months ago we were all talking about web services in a theoretical context, but not actually using them. Over the last year, quite a lot of the community's effort's have gone into actually starting to deploy some web services," Finney says.

Vodafone Australia chief market officer Ian Scherger says 14 per cent of customer SIM card activations were carried out over the web last year. However, he says telecommunications is "somewhat behind other industries" in driving up-take of the technology.

Vodafone plans to use web services to extend its web based self-service model, with the aim of giving mobile handsets the central role.

But providing customers with a consistent experience across the web, with handsets and voice-recognition systems, is a challenge.

He says the telecommunications industry can't blame enterprise software vendors for the problem.

"The vendors are performing as well as the direction that we give them," Scherger says.

"Where we are clear about our execution and our customer experience they're doing very well," .

In the early days, there was much bickering over standards such as web services security and financial organisations felt uncomfortable exposing sensitive applications outside their own networks.

However, these days, web services proponents argue security is ready for prime time.

Groups are taking it up and finding it offers them a level of protection that is appropriate for what they're trying to do, Hale says.

However the words, "What enterprises are trying to do" may need special consideration.

The CBA's Girn says while some early barriers to adoption concerning security standards appear to have been fixed, the financial sector is still reluctant to expose their transaction to web services at the network perimeter.

"I'm not sure if the industry, particularly around financial transactions, is ready for that in terms of security," he says.

Sun Microsystems, software business manager, Laurie Wong agrees that while the broad security standards have been established it may take some time before they are taken up on a wide scale by industry.

"The rush to globalisation is that people's own businesses are changing and what you'd expect now is a bit different to what you'd have expected in the market five or 10 years before," says Mark Freer, head of NetWeaver SAP Australia.

Timothy Blake, technology solutions manager, Oracle Asia Pacific is more sceptical.

"Will there be this dotcom services boom where we have a brand new industry built around this web services standard?," he asks.

"I think it would have happened by now, because we're three or four years into the technology."

Sun's Wong says questions over ownership of the intellectual property of these web services could impede adoption.

"I think initially that the information behind these web services is proprietary in the sense that it belongs to enterprise and it belongs to government," Wong says.

And while the software industry can agree on the core standards for web services there may still be potential for disagreement at more granular levels.

"You can say we all speak XML but within the range there's all kinds of sub XMLs and specialisations that are relevant for particular purposes," van der Vlugt says.

Web services also have to overcome more mundane impediments to standardisation such as differences in business practices like invoicing and accounting themselves.

For now van der Vlugt is keeping a sense of humour about the situation:

"There's an old joke that the good thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from."