You can interact with the web service using SOAP 1.1 over HTTP. The WSDL file, which describes the API in a machine-readable way, is available at: http://ast.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-05-15/AlexaSiteThumbnail.wsdl . The AST response schema is available at: http://ast.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-05-15/AlexaSiteThumbnail.xsd.
Most SOAP users will interact with AST using a SOAP toolkit tailored for their language and development environment. Different toolkits will expose the API in different ways. Please refer to your specific toolkit documentation to understand how to use it. This section illustrates SOAP operations in a toolkit-independent way by exhibiting the XML requests and responses as they appear "on the wire."