WS-FM 2006 CFP

In my role as a member of the PC:

3rd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods
(WS-FM 2006)
8-9 September 2006, Vienna, Austria
http://cs.unibo.it/ws-fm06

Official event of "The Process Modelling Group"
http://www.process-modelling-group.org

Co-located with BPM 2006
4th International Conference on Business Process Management
http://bpm2006.tuwien.ac.at
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SCOPE

Web Services technology aims at providing standard mechanisms for
describing the interface and the services available on the web, as well
as protocols for locating such services and invoking them (e.g. WSDL,
UDDI, SOAP). Innovations are mainly devoted to the definition of
standards that support the specification of complex services out of
simpler ones (the so called Web Service orchestration and choreography).
Several proposals have been already set up: BPML, XLANG and
BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, etc...

Formal methods, which provide formal machinery for representing and
analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems,
are playing a fundamental role in the development of such
innovations. First of all they are exploited to understand the basic
mechanisms (in terms of semantics) which characterize different
orchestration and choreography languages and to focus on the essence
of new features that are needed. Secondly they provide a formal
basis for reasoning about Web Service semantics (behaviour and
equivalence): e.g. for realizing registry services where retrieval
is based on the meaning and behaviour of a service and not just a
Web Service name. Thirdly, the studies on formal coordination paradigms
can be exploited for developing mechanisms for complex run-time Web
Service coordination. Finally, given the importance of critical application
areas for Web Services like E-commerce, the development of the Web Service
technology can certainly take advantage from formal analisys of
security properties and performance in concurrency theory.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on Web
Services and Formal Methods in order to facilitate fruitful collaboration
in this direction of research. This, potentially, could also have a great
impact on the current standardization phase of Web Service technologies.

LIST OF TOPICS

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Protocols and standards for WS (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc... )
- Languages and description methodologies for
Coreography/Orchestration/Workflow
(BPML, XLANG and BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, YAWL, etc... )
- Coordination techniques for WS
(transactions, agreement, coordination services, etc...)
- Semantics-based dynamic WS discovery services
(based on Semantic Web/Ontology techniques or other semantic theories)
- Security, Performance Evaluation and Quality of Service of WS
- Semi-structured data and XML related technologies

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions must be original and should not have been published
previously or be under consideration for publication while being
evaluated for this workshop.

We encourage also the submission of tool papers, describing tools
based on formal methods, to be exploited in the context of Web Services
applications.

Papers are to be prepared in LNCS format and must not exceed
15 pages. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings
as a volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

As done for previous editions of the workshop, we intend to publish a
journal special issue inviting full versions of papers selected among
those presented at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

May 2, 2006: Submission deadline (EXTENDED DEADLINE)
June 6, 2006: Notification of acceptance
June 20, 2006: Camera ready
September 8-9, 2006: Workshop dates