Workshop on Middleware for Service Oriented Computing
at the 8th Int. ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conf. 2007

Published by ACM

November 26, 2007
Newport Beach, CA, USA
http://www.dedisys.org/mw4soc07/

Submission Deadline: July 26, 2007
Author Notification: September 14, 2007


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 Oriented 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 and evidently
plays a key role for SOC.

While the immediate need of middleware support for
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is evident, current
approaches and solutions mostly fall short by primarily
providing support for the EAI aspect of SOC only 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.

Thus, thetopics of particular interest for our workshop
include, but are not limited to:

* Architectures for Middleware for SOC.
  - Novel middleware architectures and platforms for SOC.
  - Infrastructure services and new/adapted middleware
    protocols for service oriented middleware, e.g.:
    - Transaction services reflecting different
      types of atomicity needs.
    - Reliable multicast and complex communication
      patterns.
    - Service replication.
  - Middleware support for data and resource integration,
    access to data services, interaction of distributed
    databases with service oriented systems (SOS),
    interaction with the GRID layer.
  - Middleware support for dynamic and flexible service
    re-configuration, re-composition, and re-engineering
    during run-time in accordance with an extensible set
    of QoS properties and policies. Support for composability
    analysis of replaceability, compatibility, and conformance.
* Integration of SLA (service level agreement) support
  through middleware.
  - Middleware support for QoS negotiation and agreement,
    QoS contracts, composability of QoS requirements,
    QoS-aware service discovery and composition.
  - Middleware support for end-to-end dependability and
    security of service oriented systems.
  - Fault-tolerance support for SOS, highly available
    services, mission-critical composed SOS.
  - Middleware support for balancing of properties,
    composability of non-functional requirements.
* Middleware support for service management and monitoring.
  - Group membership services, service groups, failure detection.
  - SLA monitoring and management, SLA violation/repair functions.
  - Self-configuring, self-adapting, self-healing,
    self-optimizing and self-protecting, as well as necessary
    measures and metrics.
  - Middleware support for service governance across
    organizational boundaries.
* Middleware support for flexible and dynamic integration of
  business functions and organizational structures into
  Service oriented Systems (SOS).
  - Representation of business policies and rules during run-time.
  - Middleware support for adaptive workflows
    (including aspect-oriented BPEL).
  - Middleware support for adaptiveness and context-awareness
    of SOS including policies and decision making, active
    middleware capabilities including corrective action support.
* Evaluation and experience reports of middleware for SOC and
  service oriented middleware.
  - Experience reports from various application areas such
    as e-government, e-health, e-learning, context-aware
    pervasive computing, mobile computing, but also
    mission-critical systems and embedded systems.
  - Application of middleware techniques to support
    re-configurability and/or adaptability, re-composability,
    QoS negotiation and agreement, explicit trading of
    non-functional properties, including commercial and
    open-source products.

 
Workshop Co-Chairs:

Karl M. Goeschka (Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria)
Schahram Dustdar (Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria)
Frank Leymann (Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany)
Vladimir Tosic (NICTA, Australia)


Detailed information can be found at
http://www.dedisys.org/mw4soc07/