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A service provider is a company or person that builds a web service. They intend to create a service that is widely being adopted. Therefore, they publish their service at a service registry. A service registry is nothing else than a big library for looking up web services. You want to call an existing web service, and are therefore the service requestor. You look for a web service that matches your needs in the service registry. Once you find a matching service, you want to call its functions, using your own piece of software. To do that, you bind yourself to this service provider, by following the specific communication protocol.

A good example of such a service registry is programmable web (http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/). Please go to this link and take a look around. There are more than 10.000 web services to explore.