Call for Papers: 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop @ ISWC 2008

***APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE POSTINGS***
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                              Call for Papers:
         7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop
   http://sws-challenge.org/wiki/index.php/Workshop_Karlsruhe

    at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2008
                      October 26-30, 2008
               Kongresszentrum (Congress Center)
                     Karlsruhe, Germany.

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=========================
Overview and Introduction
=========================

Research of Semantic Web Services has gained a lot of momentum over the past 
few years, demonstrating its viability for dynamic service discovery, 
selection, composition, negotiation, mediation and invocation over the Web. 
However, design and development of Semantic Web Services tools and 
applications is still a new practice not only with the research community 
but also the industry. Software developers need to deal with new kinds of 
artifacts (e.g. semantic descriptions, ontologies, complex rules, formulas 
and facts), new kinds of operations (e.g. mapping, merging, transformation, 
querying and reasoning) and probably new kinds of user interactions and 
visualizations.

Best practices, methodologies and tools to help in dealing with these 
artifacts and operations in Semantic Web Services development are thus in 
high demand. Moreover, there are few scientific method of comparing and 
evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of functionalities claimed. Other 
than the SWS Challenge, there is no standard testbed to assess the 
robustness and applicability of proposed technologies to real world problem 
scenarios. Progress in scientific development and in industrial adoption in 
Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) is thereby critically hindered.

The SWS Challenge initiative is specifically designed to develop a standard 
methodology and testbed for the evaluation of Semantic Web Services 
technologies. In addition to this this initiative, there is the associated 
W3C SWS Testbed Incubator which has issued a W3C Incubator Group Report 
about the evaluation methodology developed within the SWS Challenge.

This workshop, under the umbrella of the ISWC 2008 conference, will provide 
a common platform for researchers and developers in the field of Semantic 
Web Services to present the latest progress in the area and to discuss any 
gaps between the scientific research and required methodologies, tools and 
applications in practice.

First, it will focus on finding out different ways, methodologies, and 
technologies for evaluation of Semantic Web Services tools and applications, 
continuing the work of the SWS Challenge and the Incubator. Participants 
should be familiar with the previous work of these initiatives, including 
the Incubator Group Report above. Papers on this subject are highly welcome 
and need not be accompanied by a Challenge solution to be evaluated. 
Participants are invited to discuss the Challenge's current evaluation 
methodology. Insights gained during the workshops will provide additional 
input to the W3C SWS Testbed Incubator Group which aims at standardizing an 
evaluation methodology for SWS technology.

Second, the workshop will continue the SWS Challenge which is an ongoing and 
continuous experiment in evaluating the functionality of SWS technologies.. 
The current set of evaluations are posted on the SWS-Challenge wiki 
(http://sws-challenge.org) and proposed solutions will follow the current 
evaluation methodology also available there. Participants are invited to 
propose new scenarios to be incorporated into the official SWS-Challenge 
testbed.

The activity most closely related to the SWS Challenge is the S3 Contest on 
Semantic Service Selection (http://www-ags.dfki.uni-sb.de/~klusch/s3/). 
However, the SWS Challenge and the S3 Contest are working in different parts 
of the reseach space. The organizers agree that they are related and both 
should be explored. In fact, the cross-referencing between both events on 
their web sites and inter-linkage of other activities (e.g., common use of 
test services) has been agreed between organizers.


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Topics of Interest
==================

* SWS Evaluation Methodolgy

 - Methods to describe evaluation aspects and parameters
 - Identification of resource consumption characteristics
 - Models for describing and measuring in evaluation
 - Techniques and formulas for evaluation
 - Infrastructures and tools for evaluation
 - Performance and scalability evaluations and benchmarks
 - Integration of evaluation tools into frameworks
 - Description of application of SWS technology in industry
 - Real world use cases and evaluation metrics

* Semantic Web Services Challenge

 - Descriptions of implemented solutions to any of the SWS-Challenge problem 
scenarios
 - Proposals of new scenarios for evaluation
 - Evaluation of surprise scenario variations


===============
Target Audience
===============

The Evaluation Methodology track of the workshop will address the 
researchers and practitioners working on evaluating and benchmarking 
Semantic Web Services technologies. It will also target potential users 
interested in learning about the feasibility of Semantic Web Services in 
market and industry.

The actual Challenge Evaluation track will address researchers and 
practitioners developing evaluation scenarios or solutions for the given 
problem set. The previous workshops have attracted not only people from the 
semantic web community in general, but also from the formal methods and 
software engineering community and from industrial research. The Challenge 
has thus succeeded to bridge communities working on different aspects in the 
field.


================
Workshop Program
================

The workshop requires two days. The 1st day will include the invited talk, 
presentations of accepted papers and panel discussion. The second day 
focuses on demonstrations of the scenario solutions and their evaluation. 
Typically, participants will be asked to develop solutions to "surprise" 
variations of scenarios overnight and present solutions on the 2nd day. 
Solutions of the variations will be verified and the participants will show 
that their solutions can be reversed so that the original problem can still 
be solved. There will be a group examination and evaluation of the code 
and/or methods required to do this, according to the most current 
methodology.


====================
Organizing Committee
====================

* Scientific

 - Charles Petrie, Logic Group at Stanford University (USA)
 - Michal Zaremba, Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck (AT)
 - Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL (IT)
 - Ulrich Küster, Friedrich Schiller University Jena (DE)
 - Tiziana Margaria, Computer Science Dept., U. Potsdam (DE)

* Technical Support

 - Omair Shafiq, Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck (AT)
 - Srdjan Komazec, Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck (AT)


=================
Program Committee
=================

* Christoph Bussler, Merced Systems, Inc.
* Stefano Ceri, Politecnico di Milano
* Siobhán Clarke, Trinity College
* Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
* John Domingue, KMI, Open University, UK
* Peter Emmel, SAP, Germany
* Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
* Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany
* Thorsten Liebig, Ulm University, Germany
* David Martin, SRI, USA
* Malgorzata Mochól, Free University Berlin, Germany
* Axel Polleres, DERI Galway, Ireland
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, USA
* York Sure, SAP Research, Germany
* Tomas Vitvar, STI Innsbruck, Austria
* Alexander Wahler, STI International, Austria
* Jos de Bruijn, University of Bolzano, Italy
* Richard Waldinger, SRI, USA
* Baoshi Yan, Bosch (USA)
* Sudhir Agarwal, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
* Anupriya Ankolekar, HP Palo Alto, USA


==========================
Submission and Proceedings
==========================

Submissions are to be formatted according to the guidelines of the ISWC2008 
conference (Springer LNCS style). The page limit for full papers is 10 
pages, for SWS-Challenge solution papers two additional pages are accepted.

Papers describing SWS-Challenge solutions should describe the technology 
employed for the solution and focus on how that technology was actually used 
to solve the challenge problems. The reader should be able to understand a 
particular solution in theory and practice by reading a solution paper. 
Additional submission of the code and documentation of the solution is 
strongly encouraged.

Note that ISWC requires workshop attendees to also register for the main 
conference. So try to register both for the conference and the workshop 
before the ISWC2008 early registration deadline.

Since the ISWC does not include workshop proceedings, we intend to publish 
the workshop proceedings online at CEUR-WS. If the number of high-quality 
submissions is high enough, we will pursue publishing the proceedings as a 
journal special issue or as printed proceedings.

* Guidelines for Paper Submission *
Papers are to be submitted online via the SWSC-ISWC2008 EasyChair submission 
system http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=swsciswc2008. In case of 
any further questions about submission process, contact Omair Shafiq 
(omair.shafiq@sti2.at).

* Guidelines for Code Submission (only for SWS Challenge solution papers) *
Interested participants should directly contact Srdjan Komazec 
(srdjan.komazec@sti2.at) to get an account for the SWS-Challenge FTP server 
(ftp://sws-challenge.org).


===============
Important Dates
===============

* Submissions due: 25 July 2008
* Acceptances: 5 September 2008
* Camera ready papers: 26 September 2008
* Camera ready proceedings: 03 October 2008
* Workshop dates: 26-27 October 2008 (to be confirmed)

Please do not hesitate to contact Charles Petrie for any questions you have!



--------------------------------------------------------------------
Omair Shafiq
Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck www.sti-innsbruck.at
University of Innsbruck (UIBK) www.uibk.ac.at
ICT Technology Park, Technikerstraße 21a,
6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
E:  omair.shafiq@sti2.at
T: +43 512 507 6480
F: +43 512 507 9872

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2008 00:46:05 UTC