Defining Web Services - What is the requirement to make namespace definitions accessible?

Question

Hello, I am sitting down to define my first web service and have what is probably a basic question about the accessibility requirements of namespace definitions?

When a consumer of these web services identifies message elements as belonging to my namespace, must the URI reference for this namespace be available at the time the message is sent?

I am wondering if any message validation against the namespace definition is done at messaging time. I'm guessing not since a failure of URI reference host shouldn't prevent messaging from occuring.

Can anyone share any thoughts on the requirement here, or perhaps provide direction to a good source of information?

Thanks, M.

Answer 1

No, the namespace URI is not intended to be dereferenced. It is polite to put something human-readable at the namespace URI, but there is no technical reason you have to.

Message validation is not directly related to namespace URIs, which are in practice little more than opaque strings. You can start tying them together using XSI, but in this case it is the XSD file URI that will be dereferenced, not the namespace URI.