Welcome to the LexisNexis® Web Services Kit

Through the Internet, you are presented with both the opportunities and challenges of doing business in a global marketplace. Your clients may be located on the other side of the city, the country, or the world. They keep asking for newer and better products and services faster and at a lower cost. And, you may be continuously feeling competitive pressure for their business from a variety of sources. This is not the playground for the timid or the uninformed. If your organization is determined to meet these market challenges head on, the LexisNexis® Research Services have a massive and varied collection of both the current and historical information to help you do it.

LexisNexis is one of the world's leading and most respected providers of online research services. The LexisNexis information warehouse contains millions of documents dating back many years and covering a multitude of topics. Using advanced communications channels that reach out to thousands of our information providers around the world, new documents can be available online before, as, or very shortly after they are published. This gives you instant access to both the most current and historical information related to news, legal, business, financial, political, industrial, and many other topics.

With the flexibility offered by the LexisNexis Web Services Kit, you have control over this vital resource. You can create custom research utilities and embed them in your system where they are needed. Arrangements can even be made download documents in bulk and store them on your local server so that the information you need is always close at hand and can be used in unique ways. This flexibility lets you quickly retrieve the information you need when you need it and deliver it in the fashion and at the locations of your choosing.

About the LexisNexis Web Services Kit

The Internet has become the standard global communications network permitting real-time information exchanges with other Internet users around the world. Many organizations are also developing sophisticated Intranet networks to instantly connect their employees to each other and the rest of the world. These organizations have found that the ability of their people to quickly get the information they need for their job is the edge that keeps their organization on the leading edge.

To help people get the right information right now, LexisNexis offers a variety of powerful online research applications. Although these applications can satisfy most organizations' online research needs, some organizations may have additional needs that are somewhat unique. For example, they may want to create smaller online research gadgets that can be incorporated into their Intranet network or that assist in their user's workflow such as by providing one-click retrieval of the most current information on a given topic. And they want the flexibility of styling and manipulating information that has been marked up in XML.

To support their internal systems and interaction with the Internet, many organizations have their own staff of very talented Web developers or have access to companies that specialize in developing Web Services applications. Given the right tools, these developers can make almost any software application idea a reality. As for providing customized online research capabilities, we feel the LexisNexis Web Services Kit offers the right tools. We designed the Web Services Kit API (Application Programming Interface) to allow developers to incorporate many of our most popular research capabilities into one or more online research applications with minimal coding effort.

With the LexisNexis Web Services Kit, you control those portions of the process that interact directly with your users. For example, you'll design the mechanism your users will use to request information. You'll then package that request in a message to the Web Services Kit server. Your request will be processed immediately and you'll be sent a response message containing the XML documents or other information you requested. Finally you'll use the flexibility of XML to style those documents and present them to your users. And by using a Web Services development tool that supports the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), you can use the provided WSDL files to build valid message structures and even handle the message exchanges between your system and LexisNexis.

Developing Your Online Research Applications
Each customer implementation of the LexisNexis Web Services Kit is unique. Therefore, to ensure that your implementation is successful, it will be treated as a LexisNexis project. A project team will be formed to help guide your online research applications through the following four phases of the project:

The Implementation Process page describes this process in more detail. It outlines the entry and exit criteria for each of the phases as well as the events that will take place during those phases. In addition, this page describes the Web Services Kit Data Hosting feature that lets you host some frequently used LexisNexis Documents on your local server. Due to the agreements we have with our information providers, there are some restrictions we must enforce. This page describes those restrictions.

About the Secured Developer's Area
Most of the work of analyzing your requests, verifying authorizations, retrieving the appropriate information, and packaging the response is performed deep within the LexisNexis system. However, some information provided here is still considered a potential security risk in the hands of unauthorized individuals. Therefore you will notice that the first time you attempt to access the secured areas of this site, you will be required to enter a special ID and password. If you haven't been provided with them already, please contact your LexisNexis Account Representative or your Technical Assistant at LexisNexis.

The following types of information are covered in this secured developer's area:

Specification Summary

Web Services Interface Data Format Web Services Toolkits Compliant So when your ready, dig out your special ID and password, click one of the links in the navigation area on the left, and together we'll get started.

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