Apologies for cross-postings

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION

The 8th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop – SWSC 2009

http://sws-challenge.org/wiki/index.php/Workshop_ECOWS_2009

In conjunction with European Conference on Web Services - ECOWS 09

November 9th 2009

Eindhoven, The Netherlands

This SWS Challenge workshop, in conjunction with ECOWS 2009, provides a forum for researchers and developers of Semantic Web Services to present and discuss the latest progress in the area and to discuss the gap between research, required methodologies, tools and their applications in practice.

The workshop invites the submission of papers related to the topics of interest below as well as papers describing a solution for one of the SWS-Challenge scenarios. Participants are also invited to propose industrially-relevant new scenarios to be incorporated into the official SWS Challenge testbed.

NEWS: Extended submission deadlines (see below).

NEWS: Matthias Klusch will give an invited talk (see below).

Important Dates

· Contact SWSC scenario's owner for submitting a solution: before the paper submission deadline (extended)

· Abstract submission deadline: before the paper submission deadline (extended)

· General paper submission deadline (for all papers except SWSC scenario solution papers): 20 September 2009 (extended)

· Notifications for all submissions: 7 October 2009

· SWSC scenario solution full papers deadline: 1 November 2009

· Workshop: 9 November 2009

Organizing Committee

Charles Petrie, Stanford Computer Science Department Logic Group

Ulrich Küster, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany

Liliana Cabral, Knowledge Media Institute - KMI, The Open University, UK

Federico Facca, STI Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Topics of Interest

SWS Evaluation Methodology

Methods to describe SWS evaluation aspects and parameters
Models for describing and measuring in SWS evaluation
Techniques and formulas for SWS evaluation
Infrastructures and tools for SWS evaluation
SWS performance and scalability evaluations and benchmarks
Integration of SWS evaluation tools into frameworks

SWS - Theory of Evaluations

Significance and usage of SWS evaluation
Theories, models and technologies relevant to SWS evaluation
Application of SWS technology on industry problems and real world use cases
Development of Benchmark problems for SWS technologies
Evaluation of SWS technology in theory and practice

SWS - Testbeds

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

Workshop Description

Research on 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 within the research community but also in 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 methods of comparing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of functionalities claimed by different approaches.

The SWS Challenge has been one of the first initiatives providing a number of real world problem scenarios and a standard testbed to assess the robustness and applicability of proposed technologies, without which progress in scientific development and in industrial adoption in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) could be critically hindered. The evaluation of SWS approaches and tools is especially important for informing the proper implementation of web services so that they can be used by businesses in a largely technology-indpendent manner.

The SWS Challenge is open to all technologies and approaches, including hard-coded programming, logic-based frameworks, and/or model-driven techniques. All of these have proven successful to various degrees though we expect to see more differentiation as the surprise problems become more challenging.

The SWS Challenge is associated with the one-year W3C SWS Testbed Incubator, which has issued a W3C Incubator Group Report about the evaluation methodology developed within the SWS Challenge. Participants submitting papers on evaluation methodology are encouraged to get familiar with the the W3C SWS Testbed Incubator Report.

This workshop continues a series of SWS Challenge workshops which is an ongoing and continuous experiment in evaluating the functionality of SWS technologies.

We are very happy to announce the official release of a new SWS discovery scenario designed and contributed by CEFRIEL and the University of Bicocca. Together with the previous scenarios, this scenario is open for participation and evaluation at this workshop.

Invited Talk

Matthias Klusch, DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany confirmed to present a keynote on "Semantic Service Retrieval: Tools, Evaluation and Challenges". Matthias is well known for his successful initiatives towards standard SWS benchmarks. Among many other activities, he is the primary organizer of the S3 Contest on Semantic Service Selection and also leads the development of OWLS-TC and SAWSDL-TC, the so far most widely used SWS test collections

Program of the Workshop

The one-day workshop will include presentations of accepted papers and a keynote by Matthias Klusch, DFKI Saarbrücken on "Semantic Service Retrieval: Tools, Evaluation and Challenges."

The afternoon will be dedicated to the SWS-Challenge and provide room for detailed code reviews, technology discussion, and certification of SWS-Challenge solution papers. There will also be a session on the SEALS project, a recently started EU-funded project on Semantic Evaluation at Large Scale.

The detailed program will be announced before the workshop.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Papers must be in English and formatted according to the Springer LNCS guidelines. We solicit the submission of the following types of papers:

· Short research papers (max 6 pages)

· Position papers (max 6 pages)

· Full research papers (max 12 pages)

· Full SWS-Challenge solution papers (max 14 pages)

SWS-Challenge solution papers describe an implemented solution to any of the SWS-Challenge problem scenarios. They should describe the technology employed for the solution but 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. SWS-Challenge solutions will be code reviewed and certified on the second workshop day.

For SWSC solution papers we allow to submit a short preliminary version (typically 4-6 pages) instead of the full version by the general submission deadline. That is, authors of solution papers have two options:

If they want more time, they submit a short preliminary paper by the general submission deadline and the full solution paper latest one week prior to the workshop.
If they want to avoid the effort of preparing two papers, they submit the full solution paper by the general submission deadline already (and do not submit a short preliminary paper).

Acceptance to present a SWSC scenario solution at the workshop will be based on whatever paper has been submitted by the general paper deadline.

Accepted papers will be published in CEUR Workshops Proceedings.

Papers that are not presented at the workshop will not be included in the proceedings. Solution papers describing solutions that are not demonstrated at the workshop will also not be included in the proceedings.

Papers need to be submitted to the Easy-Chair installation for the workshop.

Code Submission Guidelines

Participants providing a solution for one of the SWS Challenge Scenarios (see below) should contact the person in charge before the main paper submission deadline.

· Mediation

o Scenario: Purchase Order Mediation

o Scenario: Purchase Order Mediation v2

o Scenario: Payment Problem

· Discovery

o Scenario: Shipment Discovery

o Scenario: Discovery II and Simple Composition

o Scenario: Logistics Management

SWS-Challenge Certification Results

Certification will be done at the Workshop by the Workshop. Results will be announced immediately afterwards

Registration and Fees

ECOWS requires workshop participants to also register for the main conference

Local Information

Local information is available through the ECOWS 2009 website.

Program Committee

Sudhir Agarwal, AIFB, University of karlsruhe, Germany

Oscar Corcho, Universidade Politecnica de Madrid, Spain

Stefan Dietze, KMi, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Raul Garcia-Castro, Universidade Politecnica de Madrid, Spain

Pascal Hitzler, AIFB, University of karlsruhe, Germany

Mick Kerrigan, STI Innsbruck, Austria

Birgitta Koenig-Ries, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

Christian Kubczak, TU Dortmund, Germany

Tiziana Margaria, University of Potsdam, Germany

David Martin, SRI International, USA

Carlos Pedrinaci, KMi, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Vlad Tanasescu, University of Edinburgh, UK

______________________________________________

Dr. Liliana Cabral
Research Associate,
Knowledge Media Institute - KMI,
The Open University,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.

Tel: +44 1908 652624
Fax: +44 1908 653169

The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).