News: 2005-12-22

A selection of pictures of the ICSOC 2005 conference can be found here (Click here)

The technical report of the Demonstration Session at ICSOC 2005 can be downloaded here

News: 2005-12-21

Slides of the keynote presentations are available on the Keynotes page reachable via the Program menu. Or go there directly.

3rd International Conference on Service Oriented Computing,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
December 12-15, 2005

Themes and Objectives

Service-oriented computing is the new emerging cross-disciplinary paradigm for distributed computing that is changing the way software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed. Services are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols for the purpose of building networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries.

Web Services are the current most promising technology based on the idea of service oriented computing. Web services provide the basis for the development and execution of business processes that are distributed over the network and available via standard interfaces and protocols.

Combined with recent developments in the area of distributed systems, workflow management systems, business protocols and languages, services can provide the automated support needed for e-business collaboration and integration both at the data and business logic level. They also provide a sound support framework for developing complex business transaction sequences and business collaboration applications.

The 3rd International Conference of Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC'05) follows on the success of two previous editions in New York City, USA (2004) and Trento, Italy (2003), and aims at consolidating as the main reference conference for service oriented computing and web services, by covering the entire spectrum from theoretical and foundational results to empirical evaluations as well as practical and industrial experiences. ICSOC'05 proposes several innovations to achieve this goal.

The ICSOC '05 Challenge: fostering "cross-communities" scientific excellence

Service oriented computing poses a number of research challenges that are intrinsically "transversal" to more established and traditional research fields. Main research challenges such as the composition, discovery, integration, monitoring, of services, their quality and security, methodologies supporting their development, evolution, adaptation, as well as their life-cycle management, are attracting the interest of researchers in very diverse communities, such as databases, software engineering, artificial intelligence, distributed and information systems just to name a few. ICSOC'05 has been thought with two goals in mind:

• Crossing the boundaries of the existing communities by attracting top level scientific contributions from different scientific communities, thus creating a scientific venue where participants can share ideas and compare their approaches to tackling the many still open common research challenges.

• Establishing a link between research and industry. Due to the industrial relevance of many research challenges and service oriented technologies, ICSOC'05 inherits from previous editions a strong industrial presence, both in the conference organization and in the program.

This year we have taken concrete steps to achieve these goals. We have introduced area coordinators, who have the key role of reaching out to the different scientific communities and to support the evaluation and selection of papers related to the diverse communities. Scientific communities of interest for ICSOC'05 include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Middleware
• Security and Privacy
• Databases
• Software Engineering
• Pervasive, Mobile, and P2P Systems
• Information Systems
• Automated Planning
• Semantic Web Services
• Software Agents
• Formal Methods
• WS management/Grid Computing

In addition, a vision program will provide presentations on ideas and projects that are very innovative and promising, but are still in their initial phase, and therefore did not yet develop solid results. A Demo program will act as a link between theory and practical applications, showing how research results can be put into practice. Finally, a renewed review process will include a rebuttal phase to let authors provide feedback on the reviews and help achieve a fair and thorough evaluation of all papers.