Web Service Choreography (WS-Choreography) is a specification by the W3C defining a XML-based business process modeling language that describes collaboration protocols of cooperating Web Service participants, in which services act as peers, and interactions may be long-lived and stateful.

The underlying intuition behind the notion of choreography can be summarised as follows.

“Dancers dance following a global scenario without a single point of control"

Web Service Choreography leverages the power of Web services to allow entities to create business processes that mirror today's dynamic and ever-changing business needs. Organizations can expose their application software and resources as Web services so that others can dynamically find and use them in their business processes. Creating a business process requires not only a clear definition of collaboration patterns of all its components but also a way of depicting standard B2B interactions. WS-Choreography addresses the vision of true Web service coordination and collaboration by:

1. Providing practical models for dynamic, reusable and scalable process compositions and choreography

2. Addressing technical completeness/correctness/executability issues

3. Enabling more dynamic, semi-automated composed processes

4. Enabling the incorporation of semantics