Aside from business processes, the service-oriented approachcurrently realized with Web services and BPEL-should be utilizable for data-intensive applications as well. Fundamentally, data-intensive applications are characterized by (i) a sequence of functional operations processing large amounts of data and (ii) the delivery and transformation of huge data sets between those functional activities. However, for the efficient handling of massive data sets, a significant amount of data

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... re is required and the predefined 'by value' data semantic within the invocation of Web services and BPEL is not well suited for this context. To tackle this problem on the BPEL level, we developed a seamless extension to BPEL-the 'BPEL data transitions.'