The European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) is the premier conference for both researchers and practitioners to exchange the latest advances in the state of the art and practices of Web Services. The main objectives of this conference are to facilitate the exchange between researchers and practitioners and to foster future collaborations in Europe and beyond.

The success encountered by the Web has shown that tightly coupled software systems are only good for niche markets, whereas loosely coupled software systems can be more flexible, more adaptive and often more appropriate in practice. Loose coupling makes it easier for a given system to interact with other systems, possibly legacy systems that share very little with it.

Web services are at the crossing of distributed computing and loosely coupled systems. When applications adopt service-oriented architectures, they can evolve during their lifespan more easily and better adapt to changing or unpredictable environments. When properly implemented, services can be discovered and invoked dynamically using non-proprietary mechanisms, while each service can still be implemented in a black-box manner. This is important from a business perspective since each service can be implemented using any technology, independently of the others. What matters is that everybody agrees on the integration technology, and there is a consensus about this in today’s middleware market: customers want to use Web technologies. Despite these promises, however, service integrators, developers, and providers need to create methods tools and techniques to support cost-effective development and the use of dependable services and service-oriented applications.

Topics of Interest
The ECOWS 2008 program committee seeks high quality papers related to all aspects of Web Services, which constitute the main technology available to date for implementing service-oriented architectures and computing. Topics of interest for Workshops include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Topics of interest
  • Life-Cycle of Web Services Implementations
  • Dynamic Web Services
  • Semantic Web Services
  • Economics and Web Services
  • Quality Requirements for Web Services
  • Web Services for Grids
  • Web Services in a Service-Oriented Environment
  • Web Services and Mobility
  • Frameworks for Building Web Service-Based Applications
  • Formal Methods for Web Services
  • Web Service Security

Workshop Proposal Submission Guidelines
The ECOWS 2008 Organizing Committee invites proposals for one and two day workshops that will complement the main conference. The workshops should fall within the scope of ECOWS. Researchers and practitioners wishing to organize workshops should submit proposals in plain text or pdf-format. Proposals should include a workshop name and acronym, a technical description of the workshop topic area, a short description of the intended length and format of the workshop, a brief statement of the relevance of the workshop to ECOWS 2008, the names and e-mail addresses of the organizing committee, a list of proposed program committee members, and tentative dates for submission and notification of acceptance.

The proposals will be evaluated by the ECOWS organizing committee. The titles and brief information about accepted workshops will be included in the ECOWS 2008 web site as well as links to the call for papers and call for participation.

Please email your proposal to andreas-DOT-schaad-AT-sap-DOT-com.