Welcome to the Proceedings of the EDOC 2006 workshop Middleware for Web Services (MWS) 2006! The workshop is a follow-up to the successful MWS 2005 workshop held at the EDOC 2005 conference and the subsequent special issue of the International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management (IJBPIM, published by Inderscience Publishers). Similarly to these past venues, the MWS 2006 workshop is sponsored by the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA).

During the past several years, Web services technologies have become very prominent in both the research community and the industry. Web services are distributed computing application components implementing the service-oriented architecture (SOA). They rely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) interface description languages, such as the standardized Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and communication protocols, such as the standardized SOAP protocol (previously known as the Simple Object Access Protocol).

In addition, Web services can use a number of other standardized and/or proprietary XML-based formats, such as the standardized Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) for describing business processes implemented as Web service compositions. Implementation-independence of Web services technologies allows different businesses to collaborate and achieve common business goals despite the fact that the collaborating Web services can be distributed over the Internet, run on different platforms, and implemented in different programming languages. Web services technologies are already embedded in various products and services of all major computing companies and used for diverse purposes.