The W3C chartered the Web Services Architecture (WSA) Working Group to describe the architectural principles underlying Web services that transcend vendor-specific concerns and uses. The working group has made significant progess toward a consensus definition of the core concepts and relationships that characterize web services. It has made more progress in aligning the architectural principles of service oriented architectures, Web services, and the Web itself, while noting the areas in which the principles of the Web and the Web services domain do not fully overlap. The WSA accepts that we operate in an environment where "One True Standard" is very unlikely to emerge even for limited domains; WSA offers a framework for dealing with diversity and evolution. Finally, WSA begins from todays reality where humans provide the semantic "glue" that make Web services work, but envisions that this process that will become more automated, but slowly. In the short run, the WSA document aligns with the Semantic Web by noting that the document itself can be thought of as an ontology for Web services, and presents a formalization of large parts of the architecture using OWL, the W3C Web Ontology Language.