<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text-html; charset=Windows-1252"> 
<META NAME="MS.LOCALE" CONTENT="en-US">
<b>SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)</b>&nbsp;&nbsp; A World Wide Web 
Consortium (W3C) standard, lightweight protocol for exchange of information in 
a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP is an Extensible Markup Language 
(XML)-based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a 
framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it; a set of 
encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types; and 
a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.