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WS-FM 2005

2nd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods

Versailles, 1-3 September 2005
France


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 moving towards two main directions:
The first one tends to the definition of new 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...
The second approach consists of the design of new (meta-)Web Services to be exploited at run-time by other Web Services: e.g. managing the cooperation of Web Services or acting as dynamic registry services.

Formal methods, which privide formal machinery for representing and analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems, may potentially play a fundamental role in the development of such innovations. First of all they may help in understanding 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 may 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 of a service and not just a Web Service name. Thirdly also 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 activate a 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 descripion 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
  • Comparisons with different related technologies/approaches

Paper submission

Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for this workshop. Papers should be submitted following the instructions at the WS-FM 2005 submission site.

Papers are to be prepared in LNCS format and must not exceed 15 pages. Accepted original papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. It is planned to publish the proceedings in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

As done for the previous WS-FM'04 workshop, we intend to publish a journal special issue inviting full versions of papers selected among those presented at the workshop.

Workshop Chair:  

Mario Bravetti and Gianluigi Zavattaro (University of Bologna)

Program Committee:

Marco Aiello  University of Trento, Italy
Jean-Pierre Banatre University of Rennes1 and INRIA, France
Boualem Benatallah  University of New South Wales, Australia
Karthik Bhargavan Microsoft research Cambridge, UK
Manfred Broy Technische Universitat Munchen, Germany
Roberto Bruni  University of Pisa, Italy
Michael Butler  University of Southampton, UK
Fabio Casati HP Labs, USA
Rocco De Nicola  University of Florence, Italy
Schahram Dustdar  Wien University of Technology, Austria
Gianluigi Ferrari  University of Pisa, Italy
Jose Luiz Fiadeiro  University of Leicester, UK
Peter Furniss  Choreology Ltd, UK
Stephanie Gnesi CNR Pisa, Italy
Reiko Heckel  University of Leicester, UK
Nickolas Kavantzas  Oracle Co., USA
Leila Kloul Université de Versailles, France
Mark Little  Arjuna Technologies Limited, UK
Natalia López University Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Roberto Lucchi University of Bologna, Italy
Jeff Magee  Imperial College London, UK
Fabio Martinelli  CNR 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 Sussex, UK
Frank Van Breugel  York University, Toronto, Canada
Friedrich Vogt Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany

Important dates:

Submission deadline:    6 May 2005 (EXTENDED)
Author notification:    10 June 2005
Camera-ready copy:    20 June 2005