Services on the Internet allow almost instant distribution and frequent updates of any kind of information. You can provide services to employees of your own company (solving the information distribution problems of spread-out companies), or you can serve the world. Perhaps you'd like to create an Internet service equivalent to the telephone company's directory assistance. Or maybe you're the Species Survival Commission, and you'd like your plans online; this book describes a prototype service the authors created to make SSC's endangered species Action Plans viewable worldwide. Whatever you have in mind can be done. This book tells you how.

Creating a service can be a big job, involving more than one person. This book separates the setup and maintenance of server software from the data management, so that a team can divide responsibilities. Sections and chapters on data management, a role we call the Data Librarian, are marked with a special icon.