— Industry is more and more interested in executing business functions that span multiple applications. This demands high-levels of interoperability and a more flexible and adaptive business process management. The trend is to have systems assembled from a loosely coupled collection of Web services, which are ubiquitous and organically integrated. This technical area appears to be a natural environment in which the agent technology can be exploited with significant advantages. In the present paper, we propose a framework with the aim of supporting an agent-based SOA. The peculiar characteristic and strength of our research work is the integration of the agent technology with other strategic technologies, that is Web services, workflow, rule engine and semantic Web.