A technical specification on "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)" edited by Thomas Schaeck (IBM) has been published on the IBM developerWorks web site. The specification has also been submitted to the OASIS 'Web Services Remote Portal' Technical Committee; Schaeck is currently the TC Chair. Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) are described as "visual, user-facing web services centric components that 'plug-n-play' with portals or other intermediary web applications that aggregate content or applications from different sources. They are designed to enable businesses to provide content or applications in a form that does not require any manual content- or application-specific adaptation by consuming intermediary applications... the WSRP standard defines a web services interface description using WSDL and all the semantics and behavior that web services and consuming applications must comply with in order to be pluggable as well as the meta-information that has to be provided when publishing WSRP services into UDDI directories. The standard allows WSRP services to be implemented in very different ways, be it as a Java/J2EE based web service, a web service implemented on Microsoft's .NET platform or a portlet published as a WSRP Service by a portal. The standard enables use of generic adapter code to plug in any WSRP service into intermediary applications rather than requiring specific proxy code."

"In this Note, we define pluggable, user-facing visual web services named Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) as a paradigm that complements the 'traditional' form of purely data oriented web services... There is no standard in place that defines visual web services so that they can be found and plugged into intermediary applications like portals in a simple manner. The Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) standard aims to allow for interoperability between different kinds of intermediary applications and visual, user-facing web services... an architecture is required that defines the relevant building blocks and interfaces and protocols between them. The architecture needs to cover all the way from client devices over portals to visual web services to be included in portals..."