[ecoop-info] CFP: ACM Published Workshop on Middleware for Service Oriented Computing

[Johannes Osrael]

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/