SOAP
The Simple Object Access Protocol is a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium, which describes how objects which may be in different processes can communicate by exchanging XML data. In contrast to CORBA and DCOM which are binary standards, SOAP uses XML as an on-the-wire protocol which arguably makes debugging and maintaining distributed systems easier, at the cost of increased bandwidth requirements and extra processing at both ends of the data transfer.
It is commonly abbreviated as SOAP in technical literature.