Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a key aspect for system agility and quickly developing new businesses. 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, 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.

This 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 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.

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 of services.
• NFP-based ranking of services.
• Management of NFP.
• Quality of Services.
• 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.
• Legal status and requirements on SLAs.
• Cost and Quality models and measurements for SLAs.
• Security and trust aspects in SLAs.
• SLA experience reports.

More information about the talk here.

Vienna, Austria

The workshop is to be held in conjunction with The 5th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2007)

Flavio de Paoli
Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione
Universita degli studi di Milano - Bicocca
Milano, Italy
20126
Phone: +39 02 6448 7836
Fax: +39 02 6448 78 7839
E-Mail: depaoli@disco.unimib.it

Andrea Maurino
SErvice and QUality Oriented InformAtion Systems lab
Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione
Universita degli studi di Milano - Bicocca
Milano, Italy
20126
Phone: +39 02 6448 7897
Fax: +39 02 6448 78 7839
Email: maurino@disco.unimib.it

Ioan Toma
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
University of Innsbruck, Institute of Computer Science
Technikerstraße 21A, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Phone: +43 512 507 6476
Fax: +43 512 507 9872
E-Mail: ioan.toma@deri.at

Justin O'Sullivan
School of Information Systems
Queensland University of Technology
GPO Box 2434, Brisbane
Queensland 4001
Australia
Phone: +61 7 3135 4584
E-Mail: justin@service-description.com

Marcel Tilly
European Microsoft Innovation
CenterRitterstrasse 23
52072 Aachen, Germany
Phone: +49 241 997 84 14
E-Mail: marcel.tilly@microsoft.com

Glen Dobson
Computing Department
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Phone: +44 1524 510356
E-Mail: g.dobson@comp.lancs.ac.uk

Ziv Baida, Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands

Kamal Bhattacharya, IBM Watson Research

Luciano Bresi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Marco Comerio, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria

David Edmond, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Juan Miguel Gomez, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain

Bastian Koller, HLRS - University of Stuttgart, Germany

Michael C. Jaeger, TU Berlin, Germany

Mick Kerrigan, DERI Innsbruck, Austria

Kyriakos Kritikos, FORTH, Greece

Ioan Alfred Letia, UTCN, Romania

Russell Lock, St. Andrews University, UK

Oliver Nano, Microsoft, Germany

Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg Univiversity, Netherlands

Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sannio, Italy

Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, Austria

Antonio Ruiz, University of Sevilla, Spain

Alfonso Sanchez-Macian, University of Southampton IT Innovation Center, UK

Peter Sawyer, Lancaster University, UK

Michael Weiss, Carleton University, Canada

• Full Paper Submission: July 16, 2007
• Notification of Acceptance: August 5, 2007
• Camera Ready Copy: August 31, 2007
• Workshops day: September 17, 2007

Papers should not exceed 12 pages. All papers will receive a peer-review. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings. All submissions should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS layout.

All the papers should be submitted in electronic format (pdf version) using the following link: http://www.easychair.org/NFPSLASOC2007/.

The final agenda of the workshop is available here.

The list of accepted papers is available here.

Those who are interested in attending the workshop should register through the main conference.

Any further enquiries about the workshop may be sent to Flavio de Paoli (depaoli@disco.unimib.it) and Ioan Toma (ioan.toma@deri.at)