General Overview

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a key aspect for rapidly evolving businesses that require agile system composability and flexibility. As core concepts of any SOA-based system, services have recently received significant interest. They can be used to support Business-to-Business (B2B), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and collaborations within or between Virtual Organizations. Like other software components services expose both functional properties (i.e. what they do) and non-functional properties (i.e. the way they are supplied). Non-functional properties (NFPs) of a system are many and varied, including all properties, which are not directly related to the functionality provided. NFPs include quality of service (QoS) as well as other properties such as cost, adherence to standards and obligations on the consumer/provider. QoS is one of the most important subsets of non-functional properties. Although the term QoS is traditionally used to refer specifically to network performance and reliability characteristics (and methods of guaranteeing these properties) in the context of SOA the term must refer to a wider variety of service properties. This is because there are numerous properties which can be used as indicators of quality (including, e.g. performance, dependability, security, accuracy, customer service, trust, etc.). The term, as applied in SOA, must also refer to properties of system components at different levels of granularity (e.g. network, server, service, operation).

Non-functional properties play an important role in all service related tasks, especially in discovery, selection and substitution of services. It is simple to imagine a scenario in which multiple services which provide the same functionality can fulfill a user request. In this case the ability of the user to differentiate between the services depends upon their non-functional properties. Modeling, managing and performing service related tasks such as discovery, composition, negotiation and agreement based on NFPs become fundamental challenges in Service-Oriented Architectures especially in real business settings. Directly connected to the tasks mentioned above are the specification, enforcement and management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs give the service consumer some level of guarantee that the provider and the service/s that they provide will operate within acceptable bounds - particularly with regards to non-functional properties and QoS values. At the same time SLAs serve a role for the provider in planning resource allocation and avoiding unexpected legal wrangles. With the ever-growing demand for eBusiness, service providers are increasingly interested in enforcing contracts electronically allowing autonomous supervision of service status and management. Machine-understandable NFPs and QoS models are therefore key to the widespread uptake of SLAs as well as all of the service related tasks mentioned above.

The first edition of the NFPSLA-SOC Workshop was organized at the ICSOC 2007 conference. The workshop was quite successful with about 30 participants that attended the presentations and the discussion of 12 papers.

The workshop aims to tackle the research problems around methods, concepts, models, languages and technology that enable management of non-functional properties and Service Level Agreements in the context of Service Oriented Computing. This proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry attendees addressing these issues, to promote and foster a greater understanding of how the management of NFP, QoS and SLAs can assist business to business and enterprise application integration.

Topics

The following indicates the general focus of the workshop. However, related contributions are welcome as well.

* Languages for describing NFP requests, NFP offers.
* NFP description and annotation.
* NFP-based discovery of Web Services.
* Web Service substitution.
* NFP-based selection and ranking of services.
* Management of NFP.
* Formal methods for NFP and Quality of Services.
* Quality of Services.
* Quality Requirements for services.
* Quality metrics.
* NFP-based negotiation and agreement of service contracts.
* NFP-based mediation.
* NFP and SLA driven services composition.
* NFP-based monitoring, accounting and recovery.
* Business requirements for electronic contracts.
* SLA lifecycle.
* Service Level Management/Planning.
* SLA Evolution/Change.
* Legal status and requirements on SLAs.
* Cost and Quality models and measurements for SLAs.
* Security and trust aspects in SLAs.
* SLA experience reports.

Important Dates

* Full Paper Submission: August 22, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: September 17, 2008
* Camera Ready Copy: October 10, 2008
* Workshops day: November 12, 2008