Among the various aspects of Web applications that are subject to modeling, like navigation, interaction or business processes, the architectural aspect is receiving growing attention. This is related to the fact that the Web is increasingly used as a platform for distributed services which transcend organizational boundaries to form so-called federated applications. In this context, we use the term "architecture" to denote the composition of the overall solution into individual Web

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... and Web services that belong to different parties and invoke each other. The design and evolution of such systems calls for models that give an overview of the federation structure and reflect the technical details of the various accesses. We introduce the WebComposition Architecture Model (WAM) as an overall modeling approach tailored to aspects of highly distributed systems with federation as an integral factor.