Choreography and orchestration, in an SOA context, pertain to the use of processes that span multiple participants, with message traffic moving in all directions according to a complex set of rules. Choreography and orchestration are attempts to coordinate or control all of this activity. They attack the problem by putting rigor on how message exchanges are represented, and by organizing the overall process using the right set of control flow patterns. Use cases in this area can be inter-organizational (for example, B2B commerce involving buyer, seller, and wholesaler), or intra-organizational if the organization is large enough and the participants act as separate organizations (for example, bank account processes spanning the front office, the back office, and the fraud department).

By convention, choreography describes the global protocol governing how individual participants interact with one another. Each participant has its own process...