WS-FM 2008 5th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods
September 4-5, 2008, Milan, Italy
Co-located with the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM'08)
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.
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:
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 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.
Information about previous editions of the workshop can be found at
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