BPEL is a specification designed to provide an implementation-independent way of describing business processes and how they interact with other systems through web services. It is currently working its way through standards bodies to be a certified standard for business process description!

Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP is a standard protocol for webservices. The SOAP specification can be found at the W3C site.

RSS is a really simple xml format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. RSS encodes news items in an feed that is readable by rss aggregator. News items consist of some core elements: link, description and title, and a series of other elements. At least one of the core elements is required, but everything else in a news item is optional. RSS is often used as a catch all term for the variety of syndication formats, including the rival Atom format. External Links