Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Engineering Service Compositions (WESC'05)

The emerging paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) introduces groundbreaking concepts for distributed- and e-business processing. In fact, they are believed by many to radically change the way software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed. Web Services, which constitute the heart of SOC, are autonomous platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered and accessed over the Web using standard protocols. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) leverage the foundational capabilities of computational service models. They provide a technological as well as conceptual framework for new classes of cooperative business applications: agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organisational boundaries.

Consequently, SOA not only includes software technologies to aggregate atomic services into composite services (a.k.a. service composition). It also comprises the software engineering methodology to turn composite services into cooperative business applications (a.k.a. service engineering). These aspects are highly interrelated. Service composition became one of the major software technology approaches for composing multiple coarse-grained applications over the Web. Thereby, it originated innovative composition models with pioneering concepts for e.g. generation, coordination and aggregation of compositions. Such models introduce signi.cantly di.erent ways of managing business connectivity. Thereby they make a strong impact on application semantics and vice versa. Thus, software engineers have to take into account the impacts of di.erent service composition models. This is crucial for them to guarantee a certain quality level of SOA-based cooperative business applications with respect to functional and non-functional requirements.

The upcoming discipline of service engineering generally bene.ts from former research on component- and aspect-oriented software engineering methodologies. Meanwhile, there are already promising results on novel conceptual and technological tools to support the development processes of cooperative business applications. However, such tools need to be increasingly aligned with service composition technology. Joint approaches on engineering service compositions face several open problems and challenges. On the technology side there is still neither an agreement on service composition models and languages nor on their scope of application; let alone experiences on mission critical operation. As regards methodology, reference architectures of service-oriented cooperative information systems taking into account particularities of the service composition lifecycles are just at the beginning. This is just to name a few issues.

Accordingly, this workshop brought together experts from service composition technology and service engineering methodology; researchers and practitioners from industry and academia. It fostered discussions about problems and challenges that particularly arise during the practical combination of both fields of expertise for the realisation of service-based, cooperative business information systems. In reply to the call for paper a brought variety of submissions illustrated the relevance of the topic. All received contributions where carefully reviewed by the international program committee. In the end, 13 papers were selected with focus on quality, originality and topical relatedness. This set covers perspectives and concepts in the form of ideas as well as results on a wide range of topics related to engineering software by service composition.

Finally, we would like to thank the people without whom this workshop would not have been possible: the members of the program committee as well as the assisting reviewers for their tremendous work, the organisers of the ICSOC conference and especially Frank Leymann and Mike Papazoglou for their help in planning and implementing the workshop, Paco Curbera for his support in publishing the proceedings, George Feuerlicht for his co-operation and of course the many authors for their great contributions.

By: Christian Zirpins; Guadalupe Ortiz; Winfried Lamersdorf; Wolfgang Emmerich (Eds.)

Published in: RC23821 in 2005

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