WS-FM CFP

I'm on the Program Committee for WS-FM again this year. Here's the CFP.


======================================================================
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
======================================================================

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

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs

Mario Bravetti University of Bologna, Italy
Gianluigi Zavattaro University of Bologna, Italy

Board of "The Process Modelling Group"

Wil van der Aalst Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Rob van Glabbeek NICTA, Sydney, Australia
Keith Harrison-Broninski Role Modellers Ltd.
Robin Milner Cambridge University, UK
Roger Whitehead Office Futures

Other PC members

Marco Aiello University of Trento, Italy
Farhad Arbab CWI, The Netherlands
Matteo Baldoni University of Torino, Italy
Jean-Pierre Banatre University of Rennes1 and INRIA, France
Boualem Benatallah University of New South Wales, Australia
Karthik Bhargavan Microsoft research Cambridge, UK
Roberto Bruni University of Pisa, Italy
Michael Butler University of Southampton, UK
Fabio Casati HP Labs, USA
Rocco De Nicola University of Florence, Italy
Marlon Dumas Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Schahram Dustdar Wien University of Technology, Austria
Gianluigi Ferrari University of Pisa, Italy
Jose Luiz Fiadeiro University of Leicester, UK
Stefania Gnesi CNR Pisa, Italy
Reiko Heckel University of Leicester, UK
Kohei Honda Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Nickolas Kavantzas Oracle Co., USA
Leila Kloul Université de Versailles, France
Cosimo Laneve University of Bologna, Italy
Mark Little JBoss Inc
Natalia López University Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Roberto Lucchi University of Bologna, Italy
Jeff Magee Imperial College London, UK
Fabio Martinelli CNR Pisa, Italy
Manuel Mazzara University of Bolzano, Italy
Ugo Montanari University of Pisa, Italy
Shin Nakajima National Institute of Informatics and JST, Japan
Manuel Nunez University Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Fernando Pelayo University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain
Marco Pistore University of Trento, Italy
Wolfgang Reisig Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Vladimiro Sassone University of Southampton, UK
Marjan Sirjani Tehran University, Iran
Friedrich Vogt Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany
Martin Wirsing Ludwig-Maximilians University Munchen, Germany

WS-Policy at W3C

It's about time! WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment are submitted to W3C.

JBossWorld 2006

Come to JBoss World and hear me speak. Or, more likely, just have a good time. (Not that listening to me doesn't constitute a good time, but you know what I mean!) I'm trying to arrange some SCUBA diving while I'm there (would never have thought it possible in a desert!) Same for JavaOne, though it looks like I'll have to go to Monterey to get something in. If anyone wants to buddy up at either of these SCUBA attempts, let me know!

Flying a kite?

People who have known me a long time will know I came to be a Windows user with some reluctance. Ignoring my early computing days which included forays into the bygone worlds of punch card and tape, the Commodore PET, the BBC Model B and the Atari 520 STFM, my academic career spanned such varied systems as MTS (I think everyone should be made to use batch systems, with printouts of runs collected 6 floors below where you submit them - makes you try very hard to ensure your programs are bug free before you run them!), Whitechapel computers, PDP-11's, the Blit (fantastic machine and it looked hand-made inside!) and ultimately various Sun 3 series and Sparc machines running SunOS or Solaris variants. In there somewhere was a brief association with the Macintosh, but the lack of multithreading was a pain. As Stuart is often at pointing out (or not letting me forget!), I spent some time using OS/2; I still think it was far superior to Windows at the time.

So it's true to say that I managed to stay clear of Microsoft for a few years. That is until the arrival of Linux (Redhat ironically was most popular amongst us) and reliable PCs where is quickly became apparent that it was cheaper to "build your own" than keep paying lots of money to Sun. Obviously when you got the computers (we bought Viglen), they came with a version of Windows pre-installed and as Word became the standard for writing papers within the Department, (we used to use Interleaf or Tex/Latex), we all started to use dual operating systems, and my slide to the Dark Side had begun!

For a few years I managed to spend the majority of my time on Unix systems, but as the time went on it got less and less. Eventually, about 4 years or so ago, I was completely on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I managed to rebel a bit by using cygwin and emacs, but it wasn't the same as the "good old days". Looking back I suppose the transition had a lot to do with changes in my career, but some of it was also probably down to "look-and-feel": although I liked X windows, I found the convenience of Windows so much better. It's true to say that Linux systems these days are much better (and who knows, with the recent announcement I may try again), but I've felt reluctant to go back. This time I think it's entirely down to the things I'd lose, such as Office and Visio. I've tried alternatives such as OpenOffice, but they're just not quite there yet. But I missed Unix. So a couple of years ago I started to use Mac OS X at home and I've never looked back! It's great. I love the interface. I love the fact that it is Unix under the covers, and it runs all of the utilities I need.

However, my work machine still runs Windows XP and I'm getting tired of the interface. Compared to OS X it feels dated and clunky. And the number of times I keep going to the bottom of the screen to locate the dock is beginning to annoy me. So it was some surprise that I came across Flyakite OSX: it's an OS X look-and-feel for your PC! I just finished installing it and it's wonderful. I have to admit to not trying it on my work machine just yet, but it runs fine (maybe a little slower than Windows XP) on an old P3). So, if you're tired of the same old look-and-feel and can't wait for Vista (or perhaps don't want to take that risk), give it a go!

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
======================================================================

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

JBoss and Redhat

Now this is interesting!

Threads and transactions

There's an interesting discussion on TSS about threads and transactions. Maybe what I should have also added was that there's also a really good book that covers the subject too! Hmmm, now that JBoss Transactions is out, we should think about a second edition ;-)!

We've done it again!

I always get a kick out of a product release, and we've done it again with the release of JBoss Transactions. It's a little strange that it's not the Arjuna Transaction Service anymore, and I've got to stop saying Arjuna so much when I talk about it!