The present invention relates to coordinating web services wherein a coordination service acts as a rendezvous point through which participants such as web services may register to obtain protocol information to coordinate an outcome of an activity. The coordination of the activity may be accomplished through behaviors that may be expressed by message exchange protocols prescribed by the participants or web services themselves in an open-ended manner. A method and apparatus is also provided for coordinating web service activity with associated behaviors. Transactional coordination may be performed using the ACID model for activities requiring strict consistency or may be based on compensation actions for long running transactions, for example.