In this chapter, you learned the concept behind a Web service. You managed to author your own service from scratch. That was necessary to understand the Web services protocols. Once you got the idea of Web services, we dived into the GIS services, which were basically Web services with a geographic dimension. You learned how to author and publish GIS services while enabling the widely available standards so that they can be consumed by various GIS clients. In the next chapter, we will discuss how to consume the GIS services for visualization, analysis, and editing.