Proposed solution for WS-I Web Services: The default solution for asynchronous services in the WS stack is to use [attachment:ticket:1:True-Asynchronous-Model-from-Gent.png callback operations]. In the bioinformatics domain we can not assume that client would have the possibility to expose an external service interface, this does not seem like a viable solution for now. [attachment:ticket:1:Polling-Asynchronous-Model-from-Gent.png A solution based on polling] is more light-weight since it does not assume that a client exposes a service interface. As there are no available generalized standards for such an interface, we are free to define one. One solution is to use the soaplab async. interface, which is [http://soaplab.sourceforge.net/soaplab1/images/soaplab-api.jpg described in the soaplab documentation]. For WSDL-described services it would be useful if it were defined in a WSDL file, which should be reused as much as possible, and then imported into the WSDL of the service you wish to provide a async interface to ([attachment:wiki:AsynchronousServicesFifth:sayHello.wsdl see example below]).