This paper looks into the coordination of web services following their acceptance to participate in a composition scenario. We identify two types of behaviours associated with component web services: Operational and control behaviours. These behaviours are used to specify composite web services that are built upon component web services. In term of orchestration a composite web service could be either centralised or peer-to-peer. To support component/composite web services coordination per type of orchestration schema, various types of messages are exchanged between these web services. Experiments showing the use of these messages are reported in this paper as well. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.