Web services is a service oriented architecture which allows for creating an abstract definition of a service, providing a concrete implementation of a service, publishing and finding a service, service instance selection, and interoperable service use. In general a Web service implementation and client use may be decoupled in a variety of ways. Client and server implementations can be decoupled in programming model. Concrete implementations may be decoupled in logic and transport.

The service provider defines an abstract service description using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). A concrete Service is then created from the abstract service description yielding a concrete service description in WSDL. The concrete service description can then be published to a registry such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). A service requestor can use a registry to locate a service description and from that service description select and use a concrete implementation of the service. The abstract service description is defined in a WSDL document as a PortType. A concrete Service instance is defined by the combination of a PortType, transport & encoding binding and an address as a WSDL port. Sets of ports are aggregated into a WSDL service.