103 A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises to make integration of heterogeneous systems easy or at least possible. By building (standardized) services on top of existing components, existing systems do not become deprecated, instead they will become better accessible. Web services are the building blocks for the implementation of business processes in a web-based SOA. But how can these business processes be described and executed without loosing flexibility? And how do geospatial web services fit in here? BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is often mentioned as the preferred standard to implement business processes in Service Oriented Architectures. Using BPEL one can describe its business processes in a standardized way and should be able to execute them with any BPEL engine of choice. Since BPEL is originally designed for web services (with the W3C standards WSDL and SOAP in mind), the question arises whether it can be used on geospatial web services as well, hereby enabling integration of these web services with common web services. Geodan (a Dutch GIS company) has performed practical research to find out to what extent BPEL is suitable to use on OGC compliant web services like WFS and WMS. A mixture of open source and proprietary products has been used in this research. These products include Postgres/Postgis, Geoserver, Axis and Oracle's BPEL Process Manager. BPEL, the web services used, the necessary modifications and results of the research will be discussed in the presentation. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Sesion 1 : SDI-USE Thijs Brentjens thijs.brentjens@geodan.nl Thijs Brentjens thijs.brentjens@geodan.nl <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb49ad52c> SDI-USE