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Web Service technology aims at empowering providers of services, in the broad sense, with the ability to package and deliver their services by means of software applications available on the Web. Existing infrastructures for Web Services already enable providers to describe services in terms of structure, access policy and behavior, to locate services, to interact with them, and to bundle simpler services into more complex ones. However, innovations are needed to seamlessly extend this technology in order to deal with challenges such as managing interactions with stateful and long-running Web Services, managing large numbers of Web Services, managing the quality of Web Service delivery, etc.
Formal methods play a fundamental role in shaping innovations in Web Service technology. For instance, formal methods help to define and to understand the semantics of languages and protocols that underpin existing infrastructures for Web Services, and to formulate features that are found to be lacking. They also provide a basis for reasoning about Web Service behavior, for example to discover services that can fulfill a given goal. Finally, formal analysis of security properties and performance are essential in application areas such as e-commerce. Naturally, the scope for using formal methods in the area of Web Services is much wider.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on Web Services and Formal Methods in order to facilitate fruitful collaboration. The scope of the workshop is not purely limited to technology aspects. It also covers approaches to analyzing and designing systems based on Web Service technology, such as service-oriented architecture and business process modeling. In fact, the WS-FM workshop has a tradition of attracting submissions dealing with formal approaches to enterprise systems modeling in general, and business process modeling in particular. From 2007, the workshop will be taking over the activities of the online community formerly known as the "Process Modelling" or "Pi and Petri" Group (http://www.petripi.org).
The workshop proceedings will be published by Springer in their series Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
