WS-FM 2012 - 9th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods

The aim of the WS-FM workshop series is to bring together researchers working on Web Services and Formal Methods in order to catalyze fruitful collaboration.
Web services are fundamental to cloud computing and other computing paradigms based on service-oriented architectures and applications. They make functional and autonomous building blocks available over the Internet, independent of platforms and programming languages, and both within and across organizational boundaries. These can then be described, located, orchestrated, and invoked. Virtualization technology has moreover led to the Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service notions.
Formal methods can play a fundamental role in research on these concepts. They can help define unambiguous semantics for the languages and protocols that underpin web service infrastructures, and provide a basis for checking the conformance and compliance of bundled services. They can also empower dynamic discovery and binding with compatibility checks against behavioral properties, quality of service requirements, and service-level agreements. The resulting possibility of formal verification and analysis of (security) properties and performance (dependability and trustworthiness) is essential to cloud computing and to application areas like e-commerce, e-government, e-health, workflow, business process management, etc. Moreover, the challenges raised by research on these concepts can extend the state of the art in formal methods.
The scope of the WS-FM workshop series is not limited to technological aspects. In fact, there is a strong tradition of attracting submissions on formal approaches to enterprise systems modeling in general, and business process modeling in particular. Potentially, this might have a significant and lasting impact on the ongoing standardization efforts in cloud computing technologies.