Integration

I'm currently attempting to use the Oracle ESB as a pure routing engine for a project at work. Heres the basic way to works:

1. We get a SOAP request from a third party
2. We transform that request into a canonical format (via xslt)
3. Inside that canonical format there will be an ID
4. We look up that ID in a database and resolve an IP address from it
5. We then use the canonical message to invoke a named web service on a SOAP server living at that IP

So my questions are two fold really:

Firstly, is it possible to fire off an ESB flow via a SOAP web service call? So far it seems (to me) that i can only initiate processes [flows - sorry im used to BPEL!] via an adapters (files, AQ, JMS, etc) and not from a raw SOAP request. It seems the SOAP object is an ESB object and not an incoming/outgoing adapter

and

Secondly, is it possible to make a database call/query and then use the result of that to intelligently route my canonical data to a specific SOAP server dynamically?

I know i can do this in BPEL with little trouble but im trying see if its also plausible via ESB so i can leverage the performance and management benefits that come bundled with it.

Any help would be great as i seem to be banging my head against a wall slightly!

Thanks in advance,
Ian Harrigan