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WS-FM 2005

2nd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods

Versailles, 1-3 September 2005
France

WS-FM 2005 TOOLS SESSION

Web services technology is a widespread accepted instantiation of Service Oriented Computing which facilitates integration of newly built and legacy applications both within and across organizational boundaries avoiding difficulties due to different platform, heterogeneous programming languages, security firewall, etc... The idea behind the WS approach is allowing independently developed applications to be exposed as services and interconnected exploiting the already set up Web infrastructure with relative standards (HTTP, XML, SOAP and WSDL). The technologies related to developing basic services and interconnecting them on a point-to point basis can be considered well established but B2B processing requires managing more complex interactions involving a large number of participants and none of the above standards are able to meet this need. For this reason the so-called Web services Composition Languages like XLANG, WSFL, BPML, WS-BPEL and WS-CDL are taking place. These languages are claimed to be based on formal models (pi-calculus variants, Petri Nets) to allow rigorous mathematical reasoning.

However, despite all this hype, strong relations between theory and practice are not always evident. Few conceptual instruments for analysis and reasoning or software verification techniques and tools have been so far presented by the respective companies. Without the ability to show a great practical impact, mathematical rigor risks to become pointless. In this sense contracts conformance verification between different services and static analysis of behavioral properties becomes one of the most promising research directions.

The aim of the tools session is presenting working prototypes designed exploiting the experience derived from concurrency theory (and formal methods in general) in order to strengthen the collaboration with industry and resulting in a strong impact on the standardization phase of composition languages and of web services technologies in general.

LIST OF TOPICS

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

- Orchestration engines for Web services
- Frameworks for recovery mechanisms in Web services composition
- Static analyzers and verificators of behavioral properties
- Contracts conformance checkers
- Frameworks for securing Web services

SUBMISSION MODALITIES

To submit please send the information below to: ws-fmtools at cs.unibo.it
Submissions must include:

* Name of the tool
* Name(s) of the author(s)
* Name(s) of the person(s) presenting the demo at the workshop
* A short abstract presenting the tool and the underpinning theory. It should describe the way in which the theory benefits the implementation.
* A link to a web site presenting the project.

Submissions deadline: 3 August 2005

DEMO MODALITIES

The demos presentation will be held as a special session of WS-FM 2005. Each presentation will take about 25 minutes plus 10 for the discussion.

CONTACTS

Mario Bravetti (bravetti at cs.unibo.it)
Roberto Lucchi (lucchi at cs.unibo.it)
Manuel Mazzara (mazzara at cs.unibo.it)
Gianluigi Zavattaro (zavattar at cs.unibo.it)