WORKSHOP:WSC2009 Web Services Composition Systems

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

Inter-organization collaboration resulting in enterprise integration is experiencing a promising advancement considering the recent inception and potential acceptance of network-accessible services, or web services. Commercial, academic, and government organizations alike are beginning to share their capabilities via the exposition of their underlying software services. The notion of millions or even billions of universally accessible service-based capabilities is not only promising to the individual looking for a specific consumer-based service but also to organizations hoping to enhance their own capabilities by incorporating the services of external entities. Yet the ability to automate the discovery and composition of such services into higher-level capabilities remains elusive, due to open issues of both a theoretical and applied nature (including, but not limited to, potential semantic and syntactic mismatch among services, performance constraints on service discovery, and fault tolerance). This is funding to support the 5th Web Services Challenge, whose goal is to find applied solutions to unresolved issues in web service integration. Building on the success of the first four competitions (all but the first of which were funded in part by NSF), the 2009 competition will be held in conjunction with the IEEE Conferences on Electronic Commerce and on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services (CEC/EEE'09), which will take place in Vienna, Austria, on July 20-23, 2009. NSF funds will support participation in the competition of approximately 5 teams from the United States consisting of about 2 students apiece. Small amounts are earmarked for travel of the organizers to the competition and for their conference registration fees. The IEEE International Conferences on Electronic Commerce and on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services bring together researchers and developers from diverse areas of computing. The conferences provide a venue for developers and practitioners to explore and address challenging research issues surrounding e-technology, in order to develop a common research agenda and vision for e-commerce and e-business. The focus is two-fold: to investigate enabling technologies to facilitate next generation e-transformation; and to disseminate application and deployment experience in e-themes such as e-business, e-learning, e-government, e-finance, etc. The CEC/EEE conferences are particularly timely and relevant because they focus on the application of electronic services as they cut across several ?e-domains? whereas other conferences tend to either focus on a specific technology or on a single domain. As a means of voluntary cost sharing this year, the conference will be providing a special reduced registration rate for the organizers of and all participants in WSC2009. Broader Impacts: The workshop and resulting artifacts will serve as a centralized repository of algorithms, software, and techniques in a timely emerging area. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to gain exposure in the community for their innovative work, and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community. It will further help foster a sense of community among these young researchers, by allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. The workshop experience will integrate well with the goals of a software engineering education, as participants are evaluated on their design in addition to the performance of their approaches. To engage a broader audience in this year?s event, the PI will expand his previously successful efforts to solicit teams from under-represented universities.