WS-FM 2013 - 10th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM 2013)

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) provides standard mechanisms and protocols for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet. The many existing SOC infrastructures that support specification of service interfaces, access policies, behaviors and compositions are paralleled by several active research areas such as the support and management of interactions with stateful and long-running services, large farms of services, and quality of service delivery.
Cloud computing provides a new paradigm of distributed computation based on virtualization. Such paradigm promotes abstractions centred on services (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service) and envisages novel distributed middlewares for service delivery. Cloud computing enables the development of services amenable to be configured according to clients' requirements and/or service level guarantee mechanisms.
The convergence of SOC and cloud computing is accelerating the adoption of technologies from both areas, making the service dependability and trustworthiness a crucial and urgent problem. In this context, formal methods can play a fundamental role. They can help us to define unambiguous semantics for the languages and protocols that underpin existing 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 and quality of service requirements. Formal analysis of security properties and performance is essential in cloud computing and in application areas including e-science, e-commerce, workflow, business process management, etc. Moreover, the challenges raised by this new area can offer opportunities for extending the state of the art in formal techniques.
The aim of the WS-FM workshop series is to bring together researchers working on SOC, cloud computing, and formal methods in order to catalyze fruitful collaboration. The scope of the workshop is not only limited to technological aspects. In fact, the WS-FM series has a strong tradition of attracting submissions on formal approaches to enterprise systems modeling in general, and business process modeling in particular. Potentially, this could have a significant impact on the ongoing standardization efforts for SOC and cloud computing technologies.