An informational Web service serving data that is more often read than updated—clients read the information much more than they might update it. In our adventure builder example, a good scenario is a Web service that provides interested clients with travel-related information, such as weather forecasts, for a given city.

A Web service that concurrently completes client requests while dealing with a high proportion of shared data that is updated frequently and hence requires heavy use of EIS or database transactions. The airline reservation system partner to adventure builder is a good example of this type of Web service. Many clients can simultaneously send details of desired airline reservations, and the Web service concurrently handles and conducts these reservations.

A business process Web service whose processing of a client request includes starting a series of long-running business and workflow processes. Adventure builder enterprise's decision to build a service interface to partner travel agencies is a good example of this type of Web service. Through this service interface, partner agencies can offer their customers the same services offered in adventure builder's Web site. The partner agencies use adventure builder's business logic to fulfill their customer orders. A service such as this receives the details of a travel plan request from a partner agency, and then the service initiates a series of processes to reserve airlines, hotels, rental cars, and so forth for the specified dates.