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WEWST 2009: Call for Papers

4th Workshop on Emerging Web Services Technology (WEWST 2009)

In conjunction with the 2009 European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2009)

November 9, 2009, Eindhoven (The Netherlands)

The Workshop on Emerging Web Service Technology (WEWST) is the premier workshop for academic and industrial communities to discuss innovative ideas and research contributions advancing the state-of-the-art in Web service technologies. Although the advantages of Web services to allow businesses to interact with each other while maintaining a loose coupling are well known, there are still many challenges to be solved in this important field of research. The wide variety of tools, techniques, and technological solutions presented in WEWST share one common feature: they suggest new directions for Web service research by introducing new and sometime controversial ideas into the field. The workshop allows participants to gain new insights and to start collaborations by discussing how their own work can be used in related but different areas.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: September 1, 2009
• Acceptance notification: October 4, 2009
• Camera-ready papers: October 18, 2009
• Workshop: November 9, 2009

Topics

The WEWST 2009 program committee seeks original, high quality papers related to emerging aspects of Web services, including but not limited to the following topics.

• Self-organizing SOA
• Dynamic service discovery
• Automated service composition
• Dynamic service binding
• Service evolution
• Coordination and business transactions
• Embedded devices and sensors as services
• Streaming services
• Event-driven architectures
• Middleware for SOA
• SLA enforcement
• Reputation mechanisms
• Technologies for social collaborations and service markets

Format and Proceedings

The workshop features regular papers of max. 12 pages in Springer's LNCS format. Before the workshop, the accepted papers will be made available online. Post-proceedings with the presented papers will be prepared after the workshop.

Submission

Please use the online submission system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=wewst2009.

Program Chairs

• Walter Binder, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley, USA

Program Committee (to be completed)

• Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Ciarán Bryce, INRIA Rennes, France
• Christoph Bussler, Merced Systems, USA
• Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL, Italy
• Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Peter Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Boi Faltings, EPFL, Switzerland
• Luis Ferreira Pires, University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Martin Gaedke, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
• Daniela Grigori, University of Versailles, France
• Paul Groth, University of Southern California, USA
• Thomas Gschwind, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland
• Yanbo Han, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• Jörg Hoffmann, SAP Research, Germany
• Radu Jurca, Google Inc., Switzerland
• Bernd Krämer, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
• Philipp Leitner, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• David Lowe, University of Technology, Sydney
• Claus Pahl, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel, Switzerland
• Niranjan Suri, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, USA
• Stefan Tai, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Alex Villazón, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Wolfram Wöß, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Wolf Zimmermann, University of Halle, Germany

Contact

For more information and inquiries about the workshop, please contact Walter Binder (walter.binder@unisi.ch).

OneSpace 2009: Call for Papers

2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009)

In conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009)

September 1, 2009, Berlin (Germany)

++ Deadline for submission: Aug 07, 2009 ++
++ Full papers and position papers invited ++

The Second International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009) will be held in conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009) in Berlin on 1 September 2009.

We welcome technical papers and shorter position papers addressing the identification and study of the complex relationship of the Internet with space, place, geography and distance, whether physical or virtual. Technologies as well as novel ideas, experiments, and insights originating from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, including internet, computer and GI sciences, humanities, digital media, and social sciences are welcome.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: Aug 07, 2009
• Acceptance Notification: Aug 17, 2009
• Camera-ready paper: Aug 24, 2009
• Workshop date: Sep 01, 2009

Description

OneSpace proposes to contribute to the cross-domain exploration of how Internet technologies and spatial notions co-exist and evolve.

One of the most important effects of the Internet and of the Web has been to relax spatial and temporal constraints on human activities – the so called "space-time collapse" – allowing fast global access to information as well as to physical resources and services. Recently this movement accelerated, due to the success of mobile devices such as the iPhone allowing almost ubiquitous mobile access to the Internet, to the generalisation of digital social interaction through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to the virtual environments provided on gaming platforms enabled by the Internet, instant communication supported by popular VOIP providers such as Skype, and an emerging web of things. Many now spend as much time involved in digital spaces over the Internet than in "real" ones, and continuously update the digital with elements of their physical life in "lifestreaming" process. Moreover reality itself is augmented by information collected from the Internet, through the increasing availability of GPS devices that ease location based search, or through "magic-lense" based applications that add information to recognized physical elements, or reconstruct them in digital space from various media collected on the Web.

While allowing users to experience a profound modification of their interaction space, the Internet has familiarised us with new topologies – alongside the prominent hyperlinked topology exhibited by the Web, Deleuze and Guattaris's "rhizome", which has become the model of many new forms of organization – leading to the creation of new virtual spaces and communities. Indeed, P2P networks of devices create semi-private sharing environments; (micro-) blogging and lifestreaming induces new notions of spatiotemporal as well as social proximity, while sensor and controller networks enable ubiquitous access, sensing and interaction with the real world. Furthermore, Virtual globes and GIS technologies continue to improve and to blur the boundaries between spatial representation and perception by providing mashup opportunities, photorealistic visual navigation, and three-dimensional representations.

Many agree with what came to be known as Waldo Tobler’s first law of Geography: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." The Internet, by establishing new connections between geographically distant entities cannot but provide us with a radically new image of Space and Time that this workshop is aiming to explore in an interdisciplinary way. OneSpace proposes to take the measure of the aforementioned developments and their repercussion as well as to identify trends and directions for a new future blended Internet.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of physical/virtual spaces and topologies
• Spatiotemporal knowledge representation (ontologies and reasoning)
• The 3D and 4D Web
• Location-based services
• The Web of sensors
• New-generation Web mapping frameworks and applications
• Mobility and ubiquity
• Application of Linked Data for physical and digital spaces
• Digital Sense of Place and Presence
• Visibility and privacy in the Internet of people and things

Submissions

The following types of contributions are welcome:

• Position papers, max. 4 pages
• Technical papers, 4-10 pages

Workshop Organizers

• Vlad Tanasescu - The University of Edinburgh, UK (contact)
• Pierre Grenon – The Open University, UK
• Arno Scharl - MODUL University Vienna, Austria
• Erik Wilde - UC Berkeley, California, USA

Program Committee

(provisional, please check the website for updates)

• Susanne Boll - University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Catherine Dolbear - Sharp Laboratories of Europe, UK
• Stefan Dietze - The Open University, UK
• Hans W. Guesgen - Massey University, New Zealand
• Puneet Kishor - University of Wisconsin, USA
• Vinny Reynolds - National University of Ireland
• Dumitru Roman - STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Mike Worboys - University of Maine, USA

Further information

Updated information about the workshop can be found on the workshop website: http://onespace.ace.ed.ac.uk/2009/. For further information, please send email to
onespace2009@easychair.org.

The Last URI Scheme You'll Ever Need

there is a recurring pattern when it comes to the discussion of how to make information about classes of resources available on the web. web traditionalists often think of minting new URI schemes, because that was the idea of URI schemes: if there is a novel way of identifying (and probably interacting with) a class of resources, there should be a URI scheme for them.

this has changed since the semantic web has become popular, and even more so since the httpRange-14 issue has been, well, not exactly resolved, but at least addressed by some pattern of HTTP best practice called Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. while the original scope of httpRange-14 was HTTP (as indicated by its name), in many cases it now conveniently serves as a vehicle for establishing a simple discovery mechanism for descriptions about anything, not just HTTP resources. (i have been recently informed that this is the core idea of linked data, but i am still a bit unsure whether that's all there is to it.)

as a result, there is a quite a bit of resistance to the idea of new URI schemes. this was always the case, and it certainly is true that new URI schemes should be minted with care: deployment is slow (browsers typically lack good plug-in architectures for URI schemes), and thus, only big and universally relevant classes of resources should get their own URI schemes. on the other hand, there are useful examples for how long-neglected URI schemes suddenly become useful, such as the tel: scheme, which on an iPhone let's the phone simply dial the number when such a link is followed. this is useful and possible because of the explicit label that some identifier is a number as defined by the international telephone numbering system.

the reasoning for the semantic web line of thought is as follows: for well-known classes of resources, use some magic http: URI prefix instead of a new URI scheme. the advantage of this approach is usually explained by the fact that clients not knowing the special magic nature of the http: prefix can still access the resource and get a description about what it is (usually expected to be RDF), whereas clients knowing the magic prefix can behave in exactly the same way as they would for a new URI scheme.

from the semantic web point of view, this looks very convenient, because any semantic web client can safely live in an HTTP-only world and assume that descriptions can always be found via httpRange-14 (if they are available). but are there any disadvantages for the plain web, or any side effects that don't look great from the plain web architecture point of view? let's compare the concrete example of the tel: URI scheme:

• in the plain web approach (which is the way it has been done), there is a tel: URI scheme (RFC 3966) which defines a new class of resources, in this case telephones, and an access method, the ability to call them. browsers not knowing this scheme will refuse to follow links (i.e., to resolve those URIs), but since they don't provide calling services, that's not too bad. links break on the web, and that's a feature, not a problem.
• in the semantic web approach, there would be a magic http: prefix, for example http://itu.int/phone/, which would be the prefix for every telephone number URI. ITU would serve RDF via httpRange-14 to allow clients to get a description of the actual resource, and clients knowing the magic prefix could directly apply the same logic as in the plain web case and for example establish telephone calls.

in terms of behavior, both approaches look similar, with the semantic web approach having the slight advantage of the RDF allowing semantic web enabled clients to learn/reason about the resource in question. however, this last assumption only is true if the RDF uses some ontology that universally describes a telephone number in a way that can be understood by a generic semantic web client; if the RDF served by the ITU uses some ITU-specific ontology to describe the concept of a telephone number, then nothing is won, because a client would need to understand that ontology (which is the exact same assumption as requiring that clients understand a new URI scheme such as tel:).

more interestingly, this pattern produces a single point of responsibility and failure: somebody has to be the owner of the magic URI prefix, has to make sure that RDF descriptions are served, and there has to be some guarantee that this entity is stable enough that it makes sense to hardcode URI prefixes into clients. it seems to me that this centralization is quite a price to pay for the ability to serve semantic web clients with descriptions (which, as explained above, may not even be useful for all clients because they are not necessarily using globally understandable ontologies).

maybe i am just to conservative, but i still cannot see how this design is a good trade-off for the web as a whole. while URI schemes are openly published agreements on how to identify resources and how to interact with them, the semantic web httpRange-14 perspective tries to move this whole mechanism into an HTTP-based (and increasingly HTTP-only) world, but still cannot make sure that things will just work, because even on the semantic web, agreement always need buy-in into specific ontologies, and these are not necessarily universally accepted or even available. for example, is there some way how i could describe a telephone number so that the majority of semantic web applications would understand the concept and act appropriately?

finally, while the idea of the semantic web approach is seducingly simple, i am still waiting for a single relevant example where it was applied successfully. for small and isolated approaches, the idea works and in these cases, only few people would want to mint new URI schemes anyway. but for large and universal application scenarios, are there any examples where the magic URI prefix approach has been successfully applied? i would really appreciate any pointers! (well, maybe http://twitter.com/ morphs into such a magic prefix; are there any known clients which already implement special behavior when encountering such a URI?).

LocWeb 2010?

after two successful and interesting Location and the Web (LocWeb) workshops (LocWeb 2008 at WWW2008 and LocWeb 2009 at CHI 2009), the obvious question to ask is: should there be a LocWeb 2010? i am of course in favor of it, because the ongoing development in the sector of mobile web access will make location increasingly important on the web, and applications will increasingly need to not only support location, but also to share location, so that location has to emerge from the silos of individual applications.

another exciting development is that we're in the process of establishing a W3C incubator group around the theme of location and the web (nothing is official yet, though), and the workshop could be a good place to summarize the findings, and to solicit opinions about how to proceed. but before jumping to any conclusions about why a 2010 workshop would be a good idea, i am wondering how others think about this... would you be in favor of such a workshop, submitting to it and attending? or maybe you would even be willing to serve on the PC or as an organizer? and what would be a good place to hold such a workshop? probably again co-located with a conference, but which one? returning to WWW or possibly this time targeting a more geo-focused conference? i am really interested in opinions from everybody interested in the general topic of how to make the web location-aware, so please submit your comments about LocWeb 2010!

Retrofitting RETRO

ICWE 2009 was an interesting conference, and one of the good parts of it was the fact that even though it still has a substantial model-driven engineering bias, there are signs that other communities start recognizing the conference as well. i hope this trend will continue, and it definitely will be interesting to compare the programs of the 2009 and the 2010 conferences (btw, ICWE 2010 will be held in vienna, hosted by TU Vienna).

one of the people at ICWE was alexandros marinos, one of the creators of RETRO. RETRO recently caused some discussions in the REST communities because it tries to provide a RESTful approach to transactions, which often are more perceived as being in the realm of RPC/middleware oriented approaches to web services. i guess, if you want to use REST and transactions, there are three basic approaches:

• leave the transaction semantics in the application, so that clients just need to know what is going on. this is not loosely coupled, and makes it impossible to provide tools and support for transactions.
• introduce new methods. this is what WebDAV did by extending HTTP with new methods. this is a very clean approach, but also one which makes adoption rather hard.
• introduce some overlay of links and/or resources that represent the transactions. the magic .../lock resource is one such thing, but as long as there is no way how it can be discovered, this also falls into the first category. otherwise, there have to be ways of how links and/or resources can expose their transaction semantics.

the RETRO approach falls squarely into the last category, and personally, that is the category that i prefer. there are three issues i have with the (admittedly very early) draft:

• it seems to me that not all of the resources introduced in the model are strictly necessary, and least not as publicly available resources. it would be interesting to look at the minimal core, and define all other resources as optional.
• RETRO introduces media types and suggests to include a certain XML fragment in lockable resources. it would probably be more consistent and more extensible to just require certain vocabularies be present in the resource representations, so that each service could (if it wanted) use its own schema, importing the RETRO schema. RETRO could still provide default schema to use for those services that do not want to define their own schemas, but link discovery should be based on namespaces and imported schemas, not on media types.
• changing URIs from transaction-contained resources to the eventual URI is a pretty major operation. at least, there should (or maybe even MUST) be an xml:base in the resource that always sets its base URI to the final URI. and generally, i am asking myself whether this identity switch is not a potential source of confusion and/or errors. would there be other ways of doing this? and is it even necessary to have these temporary resources, or are they also optional and not part of the core model?

but even though i think the model could be improved, i really like the direction, and i am particularly interested to investigate potential synergies with LDX, which currently mainly is an idea and a first sketch, but will get more attention soon. i still think that REST's idea of placing hyperlinks in the core of the interaction model demands something like LDX: a way of how to make statements about links and their semantics (in the sense of link roles). combining RETRO sans media types and using LDX as the way to specify RETRO's interconnected transaction resources could be a nicely flexible way of allowing services to use their own media types (as long as they're XML), without sacrificing the discoverability of the RESTful transaction links.