The role of business processes in service oriented architectures (editorial)

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), an emerging paradigm for designing and implementing business collaborations within and across organisational boundaries, are currently of interest to both software vendors and scientists. In this paradigm, the functionality provided by business applications is encapsulated within web services: software components described at a semantic level, which can be invoked by application programs or by other services through a stack of internet standards including HTTP, XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. Once deployed, web services provided by various organisations can be interconnected in order to implement business collaborations, leading to composite web services. Ultimately, these composed services are there to support business processes. Therefore, the relationship between business process management, workflow technology and SOAs is highly relevant. This is illustrated by the interest in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard. Therefore, this Special Issue of the International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management addresses the link between processes and services. This paper introduces the papers in this Special Issue and provides an overview of the domain