Although service-oriented environments and technologies are receiving a great deal of attention in both academic and corporate arenas, the ability to automate the discovery and composition of such services into higher-level capabilities remains elusive. This is funding to support the 4th international web service discovery and composition competition (the WS-Challenge), whose objective is to identify, evaluate and baseline approaches to solving that problem. Building on the success of the first three competitions, which were held in 2005 in Hong Kong, in 2006 in San Francisco, and in 2007 in Tokyo (the latter two with NSF funding), the PI will organize the planning and enactment of the 2008 competition to be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conferences on Electronic Commerce (CEC 08) and on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services (EEE 08), which will take place in Washington DC in July. The first competition was limited to syntactical matching using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL); participants were required to identify and compose WSDL-specified services based on their input and output messages as specified in a directory of WSDL documents. In 2006 the competition focused additionally on the semantic linking of web services using XML-based semantic notations. The 2007 competition supported the implementation of an initial Web service interface package that served as a platform upon which participants built composition engines, which were then exposed as a Web service; teams were evaluated in terms of architecture and design as well as performance. The 2008 competition will focus on issues relating to dissemination, such as code generalization and creation of APIs that can be used to help new teams access the competition. NSF funding will support participation in the competition of approximately 4 teams from the United States consisting of about 2 students apiece. A small amount is earmarked for travel for the organizers to the competition and the conference registration of the PIs and research assistants.
The IEEE International Conferences on Electronic Commerce and on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services bring together researchers and developers from diverse areas of computing. The conferences provide a venue for developers and practitioners to explore and address challenging research issues surrounding e-technology, in order to develop a common research agenda and vision for e-commerce and e-business. The focus is two-fold: to investigate enabling technologies to facilitate next generation e-transformation; and to disseminate application and deployment experience in e-themes such as e-business, e-learning, e-government, e-finance, etc. The CEC/EEE conferences are particularly timely and relevant because they focus on the application of electronic services as they cut across several "e-domains", whereas other conferences tend to either focus on a specific technology or on a single domain.
Broader Impacts: The workshop and resulting artifacts will serve as a centralized repository of algorithms, software, and techniques in a timely emerging area. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to gain exposure in the community for their innovative work, and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community. It will further help foster a sense of community among these young researchers, by allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. The workshop experience will integrate well with the goals of a software engineering education, as participants are evaluated on their design in addition to the performance of their approaches. To engage a broader audience in this year's event, the PI will expand his previously successful efforts to solicit teams from under-represented universities.
