The business process standards leverage all the other Web Services technologies and define development tools at an abstraction level closer to the views and needs of the business people.

WS-BPEL is an approach based on orchestration where the business process is represented by a graph, with the nodes being the business activities and the arcs being the information and control flows that enable composition of existing services.

WS-CDL is an approach based on choreography that describes business processes declaratively, stating pre-conditions and post-conditions for the execution of activities. The way the process is actually executed can change, as long as the stated conditions still hold true.

ASAP is an approach based on the chaining of asynchronous services. Each asynchronous service executes independently and its status can be checked during its execution life span, to be modified or cancelled. ASAP defines mechanisms to request updated information and to receive notifications. ASAP also accounts explicitly for human intervention in the process.

WS-RP specifies ways to integrate Web Services in a user interface of a web portal, aggregating content from several sources.

WS-XL is a component model for Web Services that enables the construction of applications through the composition of components. All WS-XL components implement base operations for life cycle management, user input processing and result output.