Our focus in this paper is on enabling the decoupling of data flow, data exchange and management from the control flow in service compositions and choreographies through novel middleware abstractions and realization. This allows us to perform the data flow of choreographies in a peer-to-peer fashion decoupled from their control flow. Our work is motivated by the increasing importance and business value of data in the fields of business process management, scientific workflows and the Internet of Things, all of which profiting from the recent advances in data science and Big data. Our approach comprises an application life cycle that inherently introduces data exchange and management as a first-class citizen and defines the functions and artifacts necessary for enabling transparent data exchange. Moreover, we present an architecture of the supporting system that contains the Transparent Data Exchange middleware which enables the data exchange and management on behalf of service choreographies and provides methods for the optimization of the data exchange during the execution of service choreographies.