WS-FM 2006
3rd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods
8-9 September 2006, Vienna, Austria
Official event of "The Process Modelling Group"
Co-located with BPM 2006
4th International Conference on Business Process Management
Web Services technology aims
at providing standard mechanisms for describing the interface and the
services available on the web, as well as protocols for locating such
services and invoking them (e.g. WSDL, UDDI, SOAP). Innovations are
mainly devoted to the definition of standards that support the
specification of complex services out of simpler ones (the so called Web
Service orchestration and choreography). Several proposals have been
already set up: BPML, XLANG
and BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, etc...
Formal methods, which provide formal machinery for representing and
analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems,
are playing a fundamental role in the development of such innovations.
First of all they are exploited to understand the basic mechanisms (in
terms of semantics) which characterize different orchestration and
choreography languages and to focus on the essence of new features that
are needed. Secondly they provide a formal basis for reasoning about Web
Service semantics (behaviour and equivalence): e.g. for realizing
registry services where retrieval is based on the meaning and behaviour
of a service and not just a Web Service name. Thirdly, the studies on
formal coordination paradigms can be exploited for developing mechanisms
for complex run-time Web Service coordination. Finally, given the
importance of critical application areas for Web Services like
E-commerce, the development of the Web Service technology can certainly
take advantage from formal analisys of security properties and
performance in concurrency theory.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on Web
Services and Formal Methods in order to facilitate fruitful
collaboration in this direction of research. This, potentially, could
also have a great impact on the current standardization phase of Web
Service technologies.