Victoria,

It certainly can. If you are already working in a multi-tiered environment, then a Web Service becomes a way to locate the layers of your system on different servers. It helps to think of your Web Application & Web Service as "physical" pieces of the puzzle and things like Data Access Layer & Business Logic as "abstract" pieces.

You can mix and match the abstract pieces with the physical pieces in whichever way makes the most sense for your project.

>Don't you think that this can be established with the data access layer ?