CfP WCAT'05 at ECOOP 2005: Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities (Glasgow, Jul 05)

                                        CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS




                                                        WCAT'05


                Second International Workshop on Coordination
              and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities


                                                  July 25, 2005


                                          http://WCAT05.unex.es




                                                                        held in conjunction with:


                                                                        ECOOP 2005 Conference
                                                                        http://2005.ecoop.org
                                                                        July 25-29, 2005
                                                                        Glasgow, UK




                CONTENTS
                ========


                * Abstract
                * Motivation
                * Topics of interest
                * Submission
                * Participation
                * Publication
                * Organizers
                * Important dates




************
    ABSTRACT
************


Coordination and Adaptation are two key issues when developing
complex distributed systems. Coordination focuses on the
interaction among computational entities. Adaptation focuses
on the problems raised when the interacting entities do not
match properly.


This is the second edition of the WCAT workshop, initiated at
Oslo jointly with ECOOP 2004 (http://wcat04.unex.es).


The aim of WCAT'05 is to provide a venue where researchers and
practitioners on these topics can meet, exchange ideas and
problems, identify some of the key issues related to coordination
and adaptation, and explore together and disseminate possible
solutions.


**************
    MOTIVATION
**************


In the recent years, the need for more and more complex software,
supporting new services and for wider application domains,
together with the advances in middleware technologies, have
promoted the development of distributed systems. These
applications are constituted by a collection of interacting
entities (either considered as subsystems, modules, objects,
components, or more recently web services) that collaborate to
provide some functionality.


One of the most complex tasks when designing and constructing
distributed systems is not only to specify and analyze the
coordinated interaction that occurs among the computational
entities, but also to be able to enforce them out of a set of
already implemented the computational entities. This fact has
favoured the development of a specific field in Software
Engineering devoted to the coordination of software. Such
discipline, covering Coordination Models and Languages, promotes
the re-usability both of the coordinated entities, and also of
the coordination patterns.


In fact, the ability of reusing existing software has always been
a major concern of Software Engineering, being at the root of the
so-called Component-Based Software Development. The paradigm
"write once, run forever" is currently supported by several
component-oriented platforms. However, existing components are
hardly reused as they are, and a certain degree of adaptation is
always required.


To deal with those problems, a new discipline, Software Adaptation,
is emerging. Software Adaptation focuses on the problems related to
reusing existing software entities when constructing a new
application. It is concerned with how the functional and non
functional properties of an existing software entity can be adapted
to be used in a software system and, in turn, how to predict
properties of the composed system by only assuming a limited
knowledge of the single components computational behavior. The
need for adaptation of software entities can appear at any stage
of the software life-cycle, and adaptation techniques for all the
stages must be provided. Anyway, such techniques must be
non-intrusive, and based on specific specification languages.
Adaptation languages and techniques should support automatic
and dynamic adaptation, by automatic and transparent procedures.


For that purpose Software Adaptation promotes the use of software
adaptors ---specific computational entities for solving these
problems. The main goal of software adaptors is to guarantee that
software components will interact in the right way not only at the
signature level of traditional IDLs, but also at the protocol,
Quality of Service and semantic levels.




**********************
    TOPICS OF INTEREST
**********************


The topics of interest of WCAT'05 cover a number of fields where
coordination and adaptation have an impact: models, requirements
identification, interface specification, extra-functional
properties, documentation, automatic generation, frameworks,
middleware and tools, and experience reports. In particular, the
topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


    * Coordination Models separating the interaction concern.
    * Identification and specification of interaction
        requirements and problems.
    * Automatic generation of adaptors.
    * Dynamic versus static adaptation.
    * Documenting components to enable software composition and
        adaptation.
    * Behavioural interfaces, types, and contracts for components,
        coordinators and adaptors.
    * Formal/rigorous approaches to software adaptation.
    * The role of adaptation in the software life-cycle.
    * Patterns and frameworks for component look-up and adaptation.
    * Metrics and prediction models for software adaptation.
    * Prediction of the impact of software adaptation on Quality of
        Service (QoS).
    * Extra-functional properties and their relation to coordination
        and adaptation
    * Aspect-oriented approaches to software adaptation and
        coordination.
    * Coordination and adaptation middleware.
    * Tools and environments.
    * Coordination and adaptation in concurrent and distributed
        object-oriented systems.
    * Interface and choreography description of Web-Services.
    * Using adaptors for legacy system integration.
    * Industrial and experience reports.
    * Surveys and case studies




**************
    SUBMISSION
**************


To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be
limited to 20 participants, and submission of a short position
paper is required. Position papers should be five or six A4 pages
long in LNCS format, and include the authors' names, affiliations
and contact details. They should be submitted by e-mail as
postscript or PDF files before May 15, 2005 to the organizers of
the workshop.


Position papers should make clear the author's knowledge and
experience in the field of coordination and adaptation of software.
However, submissions should not take the form of full or technical
papers describing authors' research and their results. On the
contrary, submissions should present the state-of-the-art in this
field, address open issues, state the point of view of the authors
and theirs proposals (probably including a succinct description
of the technical means being used), and reference relevant work
in the field, by the authors themselves or by others.
Description of work-in-progress, open questions and participants'
expectations on the workshop is strongly encouraged. Position
papers should also contain a specific final section identifying
Open Issues in the fields of Coordination and/or Adaptation.


All selected papers will be made available in the website of the
workshop. Participants should read them prior to the workshop to
foster a lively discussion and improve the productivity.




*****************
    PARTICIPATION
*****************


Participants will make a five-minutes presentation of their
positions, followed by a round of questions and discussion on
participants positions. From these presentations, a list of open
issues in the field will be identified and gathered. This will
make the participants interests clear, and will also serve to
establish the issues of the workshop.


Then, participants will be divided into small groups (4-5 persons
each), attending to their interests. The task of each group will be
to discuss about a subset of the previously identified issues.
Finally, a plenary session will be held, in which each group will
present their conclusions to the rest of the participants.




***************
    PUBLICATION
***************


The position papers accepted will be collected as a technical
report by the Universities of the organizers, and distributed
among the participants of the workshop.


Additionally, the ECOOP Workshop Reader, traditionally published
in LNCS, will include a report on this workshop, providing a
summary of the workshop with the major issues discussed, and the
conclusions drawn from the discussions.


Depending on the interest of the participants and the soundness
of the contributions presented in the workshop, the publication
of a special issue on an international scientific journal will
be considered. Selected participants will be invited to submit
an extended paper after the workshop, in which they may describe
in length their research activities in the field, (including also
more detailed technical aspects). These extended papers will go
through a formal review process with an interantional scientific
committee for their publication in the special issue. Extended
papers from last year's edition are being published as a special
issue in L'Objet.




**************
    ORGANIZERS
**************


    * Steffen Becker <steffen.becker@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
        University of Oldenburg (DE)
    * Carlos Canal <canal@lcc.uma.es>
        University of Málaga (ES)
    * Juan Manuel Murillo <juanmamu@unex.es>
        University of Extremadura (ES)
    * Pascal Poizat <poizat@lami.univ-evry.fr>
        University of Evry (FR)
    * Massimo Tivoli <tivoli@di.univaq.it>
        University of L'Aquila (IT)




*******************
    IMPORTANT DATES
********************


          Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2005
          Notification of acceptance: June 10, 2005
          Camera-Ready: July 10, 2005
          Workshop: July 25, 2005




For more information, visit the website: http://wcat05.unex.es

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