3 rd Middleware for Service Oriented Computing MW4SOC Workshop of the 9th International Middleware Conference 2008 http://middleware2008.cs.kuleuven.be/ December 1 - 5, 2008 Leuven, Belgium

Call for Papers

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is a computing paradigm broadly pushed by vendors, utilizing services to support the rapid development of distributed applications in heterogeneous environments. The visionary promise of SOC is a world of cooperating services being loosely coupled to flexibly create dynamic business processes and agile applications that may span organisations and computing platforms and can nevertheless adapt quickly and autonomously to changes of requirements or context. Consequently, the subject of Service Oriented Computing is vast and enormously complex, spanning many concepts and technologies that find their origins in diverse disciplines like Workflow Management Systems, Component Based Computing, "classical" Web applications, and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) including Message Brokers and Middleware. In addition, there is a strong need to merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organizational structures, a combination of recognizing an enterprise's pain points and the potential solutions that can be applied to correct them.

Middleware, on the other hand, is defined as the software layer in a distributed computing system that lies between the operating system and the applications on each site of the system (ObjectWeb consortium). Middleware is the enabling technology of system and enterprise application integration (EAI) and therefore it clearly plays a key role for SOC.

While the immediate need of middleware support for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is evident, current approaches and solutions still fall short by primarily providing support for only the EAI aspect of SOC and do not sufficiently address composition support, service management and monitoring. Moreover, quality properties (in particular dependability and security) need to be addressed not only by interfacing and communication standards, but also in terms of integrated middleware support. But what makes these issues so different in a SOA setting? Why - for instance - is traditional middleware support for transaction processing different to transaction processing in SOA, reflecting different types of atomicity needs? One answer lies in the administrative heterogeneity, the loose coupling between coarse-grained operations and long-running interactions, high dynamicity, and the required flexibility during run-time. Recently, massive-scale and mobility were added to the challenges for Middleware for SOC.

The highly dynamic modularity and need for flexible integration of services (e.g. Web service implementations) may, therefore, require new middleware architectures, protocols, and services. These considerations also lead to the question to what extent service-orientation at the middleware layer itself is beneficial (or not). Recently emerging "Middleware as service" offerings, from providers like Amazon or from the open source community, support this trend towards "infrastructure services" that can be purchased and consumed over the Internet. However, this model may not be suitable for all kinds of middleware functions, including those addressing dependability (availability, reliability, integrity, safety, maintainability). Providing end-to-end properties and addressing cross-cutting concerns in a cross-organizational SOA is a particular challenge and the limits and benefits thereof have still to be investigated.

The workshop consequently welcomes contributions on how specifically service oriented middleware can address the above challenges, to what extent it has to be service oriented by itself, and in particular how quality properties are supported.

Topics of Interest

Karl M. Göschka (chair)
Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Information Systems
Distributed Systems Group
Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1
A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 664 180 6946
Fax: +43 664 188 6275
Karl dot Goeschka (at) tuwien dot ac dot at

Schahram Dustdar
Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Information Systems
Distributed Systems Group
Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1
A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 58801 18414
Fax: +43 58801 18491
Dustdar (at) infosys dot tuwien dot ac dot at

Frank Leymann
University of Stuttgart
Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Universitätsstraße 38
D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Phone: +49 711 7816-470
Fax: +49 711 7816-472
Frank dot Leymann (at) informatik dot uni-stuttgart dot de

Vladimir Tosic
National ICT Australia (NICTA)
Empirical Software Engineering
Eveleigh, NSW 1430, Australia
vladat (at) computer dot org

Organisational Chair

Lorenz Froihofer
Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Information Systems
Distributed Systems Group
Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1
A-1040 Vienna, Austria
phone: +43 1 58801 18417
fax: +43 1 58801 18491
mw4soc08@dedisys.org

Program Committee

• Mark Baker, Research in Motion (Canada).
• Sami Bhiri, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Ireland).
• Paul Brebner, NICTA (Australia).
• Gianpaolo Cugola, Politecnico di Milano (Italy).
• Francisco Curbera, IBM (USA).
• Walid Gaaloul, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Ireland).
• Harald Gall, Universität Zürich (Switzerland).
• Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA (France)
• Chirine Ghedira, University of Lyon I (France).
• Svein Hallsteinsen, SINTEF (Norway).
• Yanbo Han, ICT Chinese Academy of Sciences (China).
• Arno Jacobsen, University of Toronto (Canada).
• Mehdi Jazayeri, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland).
• Bernd Krämer, University of Hagen (Germany).
• Mark Little, JBoss (USA).
• Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research (USA).
• Hamid Reza Motahari Nezhad, University of New South Wales (Australia).
• Aad van Moorsel, University of Newcastle (UK).
• Nanjangud C Narendra, IBM Research (India).
• Rui Oliveira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal).
• Johannes Osrael, TeleTrader Software AG (Austria).
• Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano (Switzerland)
• Fernando Pedone, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland).
• Jose Pereira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal).
• Regis Saint-Paul, CREATE-NET (Italy).
• Dietmar Schreiner, Vienna University of Technology (Austria).
• Bruno Schulze, National Lab for Scientific Computing (Brazil).
• Stefan Tai, University of Karlsruhe (Germany).
• Eric Wohlstadter, University of British Columbia (Canada).
• Raymond Wong, University of New South Wales (Australia).
• Liming Zhu, NICTA (Australia).

• Paper submission: The deadline has been extended to August 15, 2008
• Author notification: September 15, 2008
• Author Registration: See Middleware Conference main page.
• Camera-ready copies: October 1, 2008
• Workshop date: December 1, 2008

The required format for the submission is the ACM SIG Proceedings Alternate Style. The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. This is to facilitate a double-blind review. For your convenience, we have defined a \selfcite{myref} Latex command for self-references. Papers should describe original research (not submitted or published elsewhere) and be not more than six pages. Please apply the ACM Computing Classification categories and terms. The template provides space for this indexing. The ACM Computing Classification scheme can be found at http://www.acm.org/class/1998/#. The author kit containing the Latex templates for the required style can be found here: mw4soc_author_kit.zip.

Papers must be submitted in pdf format via the submission site.

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: mw4soc08@dedisys.org