WS-FM 2008

WS-FM 2008

5th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods
September 4-5, 2008, Milan, Italy

http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/ws-fm2008/

Co-located with the 6th International Conference on
Business Process Management (BPM'08)

Important Dates
---------------

* Abstract submission deadline: May 19, 2008
* Paper submission deadline: May 26, 2008
* Author notification: June 23, 2008
* Camera-ready pre-proceedings: July 21, 2008
* Workshop dates September 4-5, 2008

Scope of the Workshop
---------------------

Web Service (WS) technology provides standard mechanisms and protocols
for describing, locating and invoking services available all over the
web. Existing infrastructures already enable providers to describe
services in terms of their interface, access policy and behavior, and
to combine simpler services into more structured and complex
ones. However, research is still needed to move WS technology
from skilled handcrafting to well-engineered practice, supporting
the management of interactions with stateful and long-running services,
large farms of services, quality of service delivery, inter alia.

Formal methods can play a fundamental role in the shaping of such
innovations. For instance, they can help us define
unambiguous semantics for the languages and protocols that underpin
existing WS infrastructures, and provide a basis for
checking the conformance and compliance of bundled services. They can
also empower dynamic discovery
and binding with compatibility checks against behavioural properties
and quality of service requirements. Formal analysis of security
properties and performance is also essential in application areas such as
e-commerce. These are just a few prominent aspects;
the scope for using formal methods in the area of Web Services is
much wider, and the challenges raised by this new area can
offer opportunities for extending the state of the art in formal techniques.

The aim of the workshop series is to bring together researchers
working on Web Services and Formal Methods in order to catalyze
fruitful collaboration. The scope of the workshop is not purely
limited to technological aspects. In fact, the WS-FM series has a strong
tradition of attracting submissions on formal approaches to
enterprise systems modeling in general, and business process modeling
in particular. Potentially, this could have a significant impact on
the on-going standardization efforts for Web Service technology.


List of Topics
--------------

This edition of the workshop will have a special focus on the
integration of different ways for conceiving Web Services, like
orchestration vs choreography, Petri nets and workflow models vs
process calculi ones, client-server interaction vs multiparty
conversation, secure but static service binding vs open dynamic
binding, etc.

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

* Formal approaches to service-oriented analysis and design
* Formal approaches to enterprise modeling and business process modeling
* WS coordination and transactions frameworks
* Formal comparison of different models proposed for WS protocols and
standards
* Formal comparison of different approaches to WS choreography and
orchestration
* Types and logics for WS
* Goal-driven and semantics-based discovery and composition of WS
* Model-driven development, testing, and analysis of WS
* Security, performance and quality of services
* Semi-structured data management and XML technology
* WS ontologies and semantic description
* Innovative application scenarios for WS

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

Submissions
-----------

Submissions must be original and should neither be already published
somewhere else nor be under consideration for publication while being
evaluated for this workshop.

We are negotiating with Springer the publication of all accepted
papers in the workshop post-proceedings as a volume of Lecture Notes
in Computer Science (LNCS), to appear a few months after the workshop.

Papers are to be prepared in LNCS format and must not exceed 15 pages.

All papers must be submitted following the instructions at the
WS-FM'08 submission site, handled by EasyChair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsfm2008

History
-------

Information about previous editions of the workshop can be found at

WS-FM'07: http://bpm07.fit.qut.edu.au/ws-fm07/
WS-FM'06: http://www.cs.unibo.it/projects/ws-fm06/
WS-FM'05: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lucchi/ws-fm05/
WS-FM'04: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lucchi/ws-fm04/

Starting from 2007, the workshop has taken over the activities of the
online community formerly known as the "Petri and Pi" Group, which
allowed to bring closer the community of workflow oriented researchers
with that of process calculi oriented researchers. People interested
in the subject can still join the active mailing list on "Formal
Methods for Service Oriented Computing and Business Process
Management" (FMxSOCandBPM) available at

http://www.cs.unibo.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fmxsocandbpm

Steering Committee
------------------

W. van der Aalst (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
M. Bravetti (University of Bologna, Italy)
M. Dumas (University of Tartu, Estonia)
J.L. Fiadeiro (University of Leicester, UK)
G. Zavattaro (University of Bologna, Italy)

Program Committee
-----------------

Co-chairs:

R. Bruni (University of Pisa, Italy)
K. Wolf (University of Rostock, Germany)

Other PC members:

F. Arbab (CWI, The Netherlands)
M. Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy)
A. Barros (SAP Research Brisbane, Australia)
B. Benatallah (University of New South Wales, Australia)
K. Bhargavan (Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK)
E. Bonelli (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina)
M. Butler (University of Southhampton, UK)
P. Ciancarini (University of Bologna, Italy)
F. Curbera (IBM Hawthorne Heights, U.S.)
G. Decker (HPI Potsdam, Germany)
F. Duran (University of Malaga, Spain)
S. Dustdar (University of Vienna, Austria)
A. Friesen (SAP Research Karlsruhe, Germany)
S. Gilmore (University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
R. Heckel (University of Leicester, UK)
D. Hirsch (Intel Argentina, Argentina)
F. Leymann (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
M. Little (RedHat, UK)
N. Kavantzas (Oracle Inc., U.S.)
A. Knapp (LMU Munich, Germany)
F. Martinelli (CNR Pisa, Italy)
H. Melgratti (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
S. Nakajima (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
M. Nunez (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)
J. Padget (University of Bath, UK)
G. Pozzi (Politecnico Milano, Italy)
R. Pugliese (University of Florence, Italy)
A. Ravara (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal)
S. Ross-Talbot (pi4tech)
N. Sidorova (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
C. Stahl (Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany)
E. Tuosto (University of Leicester, UK)
H. Voelzer (IBM Zurich, Switzerland)
D. Yankelevich (Pragma Consultores, Argentina)
P. Yendluri (Software AG, U.S.)