What is Collaboration Provider

Web services are software components designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interactions over a network, through the exchange of SOAP messages. Since the underlying technology is independent of any specific programming language, Web services can be effectively used to interconnect business processes across different organizations. However, a standard way of representing such interconnections has not yet emerged and is the subject of an ongoing debate. In this area, the term collaboration has often been used to denote a situation in which two or more business processes (participants) cooperate by means of Web services, so as to achieve a common goal. In particular, when only two participants are involved, the more specific term binary collaboration is preferred, while when there are three or more, the term multiparty collaboration can be used instead. The notion of binary collaboration is fundamental, as any multi-party collaboration ultimately relies on a number of binary collaborations.