The interoperability standards are called profiles and are necessary because of the ambiguities in standards that result in differences in implementations. Each profile covers a set of Web Services standards and provides: implementation guidelines, example applications, and compatibility test toolkits.

WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) is an organization that gathers the main vendors of Web Services tools and defines general purpose profiles, like basic interaction and security.
The WS-DeviceProfile is not defined by WS-I and has a different scope. In this case, the goal is to select a subset of Web Service standards for devices with limited resources, trying to find a balanced trade-off between the rich capabilities available and those that are the most essential.