Advances in Semantics for Web services Workshop (semantics4ws'08) - Extended submission deadline: June 4th, 2008

[Ilona Zaremba]

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EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 4, 2008
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Advances in Semantics for Web services Workshop (semantics4ws'08)
http://www.knoesis.org/semantics4ws2008/
Theme: “BPM 2.0 - Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet BPM: Semantics
in Business and Scientific Processes”

at the Sixth International Conference on Business Process Management
(BPM 2008)
http://emma.polimi.it/emma/showEvent.do?idEvent=22

Milan, Italy, September 1, 2008
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GENERAL OVERVIEW
Web services have added a new level of functionality to the current
Web by taking a first step towards seamless integration of distributed
software components using Web standards. Current Web service technologies
around SOAP, WSDL and UDDI operate at a syntactic level and, therefore,
although they support interoperability (i.e. interoperability between the
many diverse application development platforms that exist today) through
common standards, they still require human interaction to a large extent.
For example, both the process of finding a relevant service or of mediating
data that needs to be exchanged between the services require significant
manual work. To address these and other limitations, a community of
researchers have been working on Semantic Web Services (SWS) since 2001. 
  This research draws upon a variety of fields such as Semantic Web, 
knowledge
representation, formal methods, software engineering, process modelling,
workflow, and software agents. A key objective of SWS has been to automate
Web services-related tasks, like discovery, publication, selection, 
composition,
mediation, monitoring, invocation, and adaptation, whereby the use of 
semantics
increases the degree of automation.  SWS community has been enriched by a
number of large group projects and initiatives, like OWL-S, METEOR-S,
WSMO, WSDL-S, IRS, has resulted in four submissions to W3C and the first
W3C recommendation on semantics for Web services, Semantic Annotations for
WSDL (SAWSDL). This is complemented by an increasing number of open
source tools, use cases and prototypical applications.  At least 10 
workshops related
to SWS have been held at ICWS, BPM, ICSOC, WWW and other conferences. In
fact, this proposal is for the fifth workshop in a series.

This workshop will provide a forum in which to focus on selected core 
technical
challenges for deployment of Semantic Web Services and SAWSDL and reach 
a better
understanding of the relationships between commercial Web service 
standards, SAWSDL,
current SWS research efforts, recent proposals of SA-REST and semantic 
policy
descriptions, and the ultimate requirements for full-scale deployment of 
these
technologies. More specifically, this workshop aims to tackle the 
research problems
(as well as recent practical experiences) around methods, concepts, models,
languages and technology that enable semantics in the context of Web 
services,
as well as discussing recent advances in semantics for Web services. Of 
particular
interest are the architectural, technical, and developmental foundations 
of SWS,
and showing how they combine synergistically to enable service 
automation on the
scale required by today’s Internet-connected enterprises.

The workshop will in particular solicit work that elaborates on the use of
collaborative approaches in the annotation or ranking of services or other
usages of the Web 2.0 paradigm in the the BPM community. We assume that 
the very
same approach that we know from Web 2.0 – to work collaboratively – 
could enhance
the results of process modeling.

This proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry 
practitioners
(e.g. leading modellers, architects, system vendors, open-source 
projects, developers,
and end-users) addressing many of these issues (including recent 
developments in tools
and techniques, and real-world implementations of SWS applications), and 
promote and
foster a greater understanding of how semantics can assist automation in 
Web services,
thus helping people develop and manage services more efficiently and 
effectively.


TOPICS

The following indicates the general focus of the workshop. However, related
contributions are welcome as well.

- tools, middleware, case studies and applications involving or 
supporting SWS
ontologies, modelling and descriptions of quality of services (QoS), 
services level
agreements (SLAs), and non-functional properties (NFPs) of Web services, 
policies,
agreements and contracts related to SWS
- formal languages for describing SWS and related aspects including QoS, 
SLAs, and NFPs
- Web 2.0 techniques related to BPM
- reasoning tasks and their complexity in SWS
- validation and verification for Web services,
- advertising, discovery, matchmaking, selection, brokering and 
data/process/protocol mediation
in SWS and processes
- composition, planning, and re-planning with SWS
- execution and lifecycle management of SWS
- monitoring, adaptability, and recovery strategies for SWS
- semantics for Grid services and e-Services



WORKSHOP FORMAT AND ATTENDANCE

The program will occupy a full day, and will include presentations of
papers selected from the full papers category (see 'submissions' below).

Please note that at least one author of each accepted submission must
attend the workshop. The BPM 2008 conference formalities are applied
for fees and respective organizational aspects. Submission of a paper
is not required for attendance at the workshop. However, in the event
that the workshop cannot accommodate all who would like to participate,
those who have submitted a paper (in any category) will be given
priority for registration.


SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites different types of contributions:

  * Papers
  * Demos
  * Posters / Position papers

Papers: The papers should not exceed 12 pages and should
have the Springer Lecture Notes of Computer Science (LNCS)
layout.

Demos: Detailed description plus sufficient number of screenshots
or a video of the demo are required. For paper-based submissions,
please follow the Springer LNCS layout. Please note that at the
workshop itself no technical support is provided except possibly
Internet connection and power (to be confirmed).

Posters/Position papers: The posters/position papers should not
exceed 5 pages and should have the Springer LNCS layout.

All contributions will be peer reviewed by a program committee
that will incorporate well recognized experts in the area of semantic
technologies and Web services.

All submissions should be formatted in Springer's LNCS style,
should be submitted in electronic format using the link:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=Semantics4WS.

All accepted full papers and all position papers of attendees will
be published in the proceedings of the workshop. Workshop
proceedings will be published with Springer LNCS and will be
available at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: June 4, 2008
Notification of acceptance: 27 June 2008
Camera ready: 6 July 2008 (strict deadline)


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Workshop Co-chairs:
- Steven Battle (Hewlett-Packard Labs, UK),
- John Domingue (The Open University, UK),
- Martin Hepp (University of the German Federal Armed Forces, Germany)
- Dumitru Roman (STI Innsbruck, Austria)

Steering Committee:
- Witold Abramowicz (Poznan University of Economics, Poland)
- David Martin (SRI International, USA)
- Amit Sheth (Wright State University, USA) - chair

Workshop Proceedings Chair:
- Agata Filipowska (Poznan University of Economics, Poland)

Publicity Chair:
- Ajith Ranabahu (Wright State University, USA)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be extended)

- Rama Akkiraju, IBM, USA
- Jorge Cardoso, University Mediera, Portugal
- Sanjay Chaudhary, DA-IICT, India
- Emilia Cimpian, STI Innsbruck, Austria
- Marin Dimitrov, Ontotext, Bulgaria
- Dieter Fensel, STI, Austria
- Karthik Gomadam, Wright State University, USA
- Juan Miguel Gómez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
- Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada
- Sung-Kook Han, Won Kwang University, South Korea
- Jacek Kopecky, STI Innsbruck, Austria
- Michael Maximilien, IBM, USA
- Brahim Medjahed, University of Michigan, USA
- Adrian Mocan, STI Innsbruck, Austria
- Massimo Paolucci, DoCoMo Euro-Labs, Germany
- Marc Richardson, BT, UK
- Brahmananda Sapkota, DERI Galway, Ireland
- Tony Shan, Bank of America, USA
- Monika Solanki, De Montfort University, UK
- Ioan Toma, STI Innsbruck, Austria
- Stuart Williams, HP Bristol, UK

Previous Workshops of the Series
- http://events.deri.at/semantics4ws2007/
- http://events.deri.at/semantics4ws2006/