This part of OPC 10000 defines the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) Services. The Services defined are the collection of abstract Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) that are implemented by OPC UA Servers and called by OPC UA Clients. All interactions between OPC UA Clients and Servers occur via these Services. The defined Services are considered abstract because no particular RPC mechanism for implementation is defined in this document. OPC 10000-6 specifies one or more concrete mappings supported for implementation. For example, one mapping in OPC 10000-6 is to UA-TCP UA-SC UA-Binary. In that case the Services described in this document appear as OPC UA Binary encoded payload, secured with OPC UA Secure Conversation and transported via OPC UA TCP.

Not all OPC UA Servers will need to implement all of the defined Services. OPC 10000-7 defines the Profiles that dictate which Services need to be implemented in order to be compliant with a particular Profile.