Like many other incipient technologies, Web services are still surrounded by a tremendous level of noise. This noise results from the always dangerous combination of wishful thinking on the part of research and industry and of a lack of clear understanding of how Web services came to be. On the one hand, multiple contradictory interpretations are created by the many attempts to realign existing technology and strategies with Web services. On the other hand, the emphasis on what could be done with Web services in the future often makes us lose track of what can be really done with Web services today and in the short term. These factors make it extremely difficult to get a coherent picture of what Web services are, what they contribute, and where they will be applied. Alonso and his co-authors deliberately take a step back. Based on their academic and industrial experience with middleware and enterprise application integration systems, they describe the fundamental concepts behind the notion of Web services and present them as the natural evolution of conventional middleware, necessary to meet the challenges of the Web and of B2B application integration. Rather than providing a reference guide or a "how to write your first Web service" kind of book, they discuss the main objectives of Web services, the challenges that must be faced to achieve them, and the opportunities that this novel technology provides. Established, as well as recently proposed, standards and techniques (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, WS-Coordination, WS-Transactions, and BPEL), are then examined in the context of this discussion in order to emphasize their scope, benefits, and shortcomings. Thus, the book is ideally suited both for professionals considering the development of application integration solutions and for research and students interesting in understanding and contributing to the evolution of enterprise application technologies.

Like many other incipient technologies, Web services are still surrounded by a substantial level of noise. This noise results from the always dangerous combination of wishful thinking on the part of research and industry and of a lack of clear understanding of how Web services came to be. On the one hand, multiple contradictory interpretations are created by the many attempts to realign existing technology and strategies with Web services. On the other hand, the emphasis on what could be done with Web services in the future often makes us lose track of what can be really done with Web services today and in the short term. These factors make it extremely difficult to get a coherent picture of what Web services are, what they contribute, and where they will be applied.
Alonso and his co-authors deliberately take a step back. Based on their academic and industrial experience with middleware and enterprise application integration systems, they describe the fundamental concepts behind the notion of Web services and present them as the natural evolution of conventional middleware, necessary to meet the challenges of the Web and of B2B application integration.

Rather than providing a reference guide or a "how to write your first Web service" kind of book, they discuss the main objectives of Web services, the challenges that must be faced to achieve them, and the opportunities that this novel technology provides. Established, as well as recently proposed, standards and techniques (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, WS-Coordination, WS-Transactions, and BPEL), are then examined in the context of this discussion in order to emphasize their scope, benefits, and shortcomings. Thus, the book is ideally suited both for professionals considering the development of application integration solutions and for research and students interesting in understanding and contributing to the evolution of enterprise application technologies.

Conceptual modeling has long been recognized as the primary means to enable software development in information systems and data engineering. Conceptual modeling provides languages, methods and tools to understand and represent the application domain; to elicit, conceptualize and formalize system requirements and user needs; to communicate systems designs to all stakeholders; and to formally verify and validate systems design on high levels of abstraction. Recently, ontologies added an important tool to conceptualize and formalize system specification. The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling - ER - provides the premiere forum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which the major emphasis is centered on conceptual modeling. Topics of interest span the entire spectrum of conceptual modeling, including research and practice in areas such as theories of concepts and ontologies underlying conceptual modeling, methods and tools for developing and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conceptual models into effective implementations. The scientific program of ER 2009 features several activities running in parallel.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2007, held in Nancy, France, in December 2007.

The 40 revised full papers and 18 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 200 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on querying, trust, caching and distribution, interfaces, events and information filtering, data extraction, transformation, and matching, ontologies, rewriting, routing, and personalisation, agents and mining, QOS and management, modeling, and topics.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2005), that took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December 12-15, 2005. The 2005 edition had the important and ambitious goal of bringing together the different communities working in Web services and service-oriented computing. By attracting excellent contributions from different scientific communities, ICSOC aims at creating a scientific venue where participants can share ideas and compare their approaches to tackling the many still-open common research challenges. The commitment to cross-area fertilization was put into practice by having a very diversified Program Committee and by the presence of several area coordinators, leaders in the respective communities who encouraged and supervised submissions in each area. This is also the first edition to feature a successful workshop and demo program, with selected demos also presented in a paper-like fashion so that they get the attention they deserve. In addition, ICSOC 2005 inherited from previous editions a strong industrial presence, both in the conference organization and in the program. This is very important due to the industrial relevance and the many challenges of service oriented technologies.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2005), organized by LORIA in Nancy, France, September 5 8, 2005. This year, BPM included several innovations with respect to previous e- tions, most notably the addition of an industrial program and of co-located workshops. This was the logical result of the signi?cant (and still growing) - dustrial interest in the area and of the broadening of the research communities working on BPM topics. The interest in business process management (and in the BPM conference) was demonstrated by the quantity and quality of the paper submissions. We received over 176 contributions from 31 countries, accepting 25 of them as full papers (20 research papers and 5 industrial papers) while 17 contributions were accepted as short papers. In addition to the regular, industry, and short pres- tations invited lectures weregiven by Frank Leymannand Gustavo Alonso.This combination of research papers, industrial papers, keynotes, and workshops, all of very high quality, has shown that BPM has become a mature conference and the main venue for researchers and practitioners in this area. We would like to thank the members of the Program Committee and the reviewers for their e?orts in selecting the papers. They helped us compile an excellent scienti?c program. For the di?cult task of selecting the 25 best papers (14% acceptance rate) and 17 short papers each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers (except some out-of-scope papers)."

This book constitutes the refereed preceedings of the Third International Workshop on Technologies for E-Servies, TES 2002, held in conjunction with VLDB 2002 in Hong Kong, China in August 2002.The 14 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected. Among the topics addressed are database issues for e-services, b2b integration, model transformation, process-based application development, information fusion, information integration, business relation management, mobil servies, trust-based web security models, etc.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Technologies for E-Services, TES 2001, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2001.The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are b2b protocols, inter-enterprise process execution, business logic, cooperative multiplatform environments, session-oriented telecommunication services, cross-organizational workflow environments, Internet-based workflow, composite e-services, transactional business processes, e-service security, distributed e-services, mobile commerce, e-commerce, pervasive services infrastructure, and mobile Internet agents.

Information Technology for Active Ageing sheds light on the role that information technology (IT) might play in helping older adults to age actively. The goal is to understand how IT can better support an Active Ageing, which is defined here as a physically, mentally, and socially active lifestyle as a person ages. The insights provided are based on the analysis of literature collected over two years of research and practice in designing IT solutions that are specifically tailored to the needs of older adults. It includes contributions from Computer Science disciplines as varied as eHealth, Mobile Computing, Social Computing, Ubiquitous and Ambient Computing, Persuasive Technologies, and Human Computer Interaction coupled with contributions from Human Movement Sciences, Psychology, Gerontology, and report on the topic from international institutions like the United Nations and the World Health Organization. This book provides the reader with the following: A review of the concept of Active Ageing in light of its different definitions in literature, followed by a discussion of the challenges and design issues of IT for older adults; a systematic evaluation framework that brings together the different determinants that affect quality of life during the ageing process with the support IT can bring to modulate these determinants; aA literature review including exemplary IT services and applications that provide support for Active Ageing, using the evaluation framework to analyze contributions and describe their characteristics; A discussion on different aspects of the state of the art, and a look at what the likely future challenges and opportunities for IT solutions for Active Ageing are.