Ad-hoc business processes in Web services

Web service technologies promise to facilitate collaboration among business partners by helping potential business partners find one another and integrate their business processes to do business. Daunting challenges however exist before the full potential of Web services can be realized. Indexing mechanisms for complex workflows are needed for example to be able to efficiently search and match business partners on the basis of compatible workflows. Business collaborations invariably comprise multiple-parties, and the process of aggregating workflows belonging to different parties to establish a global agreement in an ad-hoc manner presents another challenge. We also need to consider the decision problem how to determine, during the setting-up of a global agreement, whether some services must be fulfilled by the same provider or not. We highlight these challenges and propose possible solutions.