WESOA 2011 CFP - Cyprus!

Have again this year happily agreed to work the program committee for wesoa, the always useful workshop attached to icsoc. This year, wesoa will be in Cyprus, which should make my attendance a bit more challenging than last year's event in San Francisco...

CALL FOR PAPERS

WESOA 2011

7th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS

Associated with ICSOC 2011
Dec. 5th 2011, Paphos, Cyprus
http://www.wesoa.org/

Paper Submission Due: September 15th 2011

OBJECTIVES
==========

Many of today's large-scale software projects in the area of distributed
systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software
architecture design patterns and enabling technologies. For these
projects, availability of sound software engineering principles,
methodology and tool support is of utmost importance. However,
traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate
for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of
traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have
led to the emergence of Software Service Engineering (SSE) as a
specialist discipline, but research in this area is still ongoing and
many open issues remain. There is a need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles,
methodologies and tool support for the entire software development
lifecycle (SDLC) for service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2011
workshop is the seventh in a series of workshops that focus on the
specific aspects of SSE.

The theme of this edition of the WESOA workshop, aligned with the ICSOC
2011 focus on Cloud Computing, is exploration of the synergies between
SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups. In particular, with the lack
of concrete SSE methodologies and approaches the future focus of
combining SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups is as exciting as it
is potentially dangerous. There are risks of providing end-users with
powerful compositional tools to create new service-based applications
without rigorous engineering control mechanisms. This area provides a
strong candidate for future research for quality assurance in SSE. We
especially encourage papers that address the combination of these topic
areas.

Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics
across multiple disciplines as well as to encourage participation of
both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In
particular, such collaboration shall be fostered by means of a highly
interactive and fast-paced workshop format with invited speakers. We
also intend to hold a discussion panel on the theme of the workshop to
encourage ideas for future research.

GENERAL TOPICS
==============

WESOA 2011 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address general or domain-specific challenges of SSE.
Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the
following:

- Software service development lifecycle methodologies & processes
- Distributed & collaborative software service development
- Service-oriented reference models & frameworks
- Architectural styles & standards for software service systems
- Management & governance of SSE projects
- Models, languages, methods for service-oriented analysis & design
- Costing, valuation & quality metrics of software service design
- Requirements-engineering for software service systems
- Service-oriented business process modeling & management
- SSE for cloud computing environments (incl. IaaS, PaaS & SaaS)
- Validation, verification & testing of software service systems
- Service assembly, composition and aggregation models & languages
- Model-driven SOA & service systems development
- Reverse engineering of software service systems
- Tool support for software service engineering
- Case studies & best practices of service-oriented development
- SEE for context-awareness & mobile devices

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

- Paper Submission Due: September 15th, 2011
- Notification of Acceptance: October 23th, 2011
- Camera-Ready Copy Due: about November 7th, 2011
- Workshop Date: December 5th, 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research
papers. Papers should be written in English and must not exceed 10
pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the WESOA
conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format. For
formatting instructions and templates see the Springer Web page:

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation. Accepted
papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and circulated to
participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings will be published
by Springer-Verlag (under negotiation).

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the main ICSOC conference to be found on their website:
http://www.icsoc.org/


ORGANISING COMMITTEE
====================

- George Feuerlicht, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
- Guadalupe Ortiz, University of Extremadura, ES
- Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE

- Invited PC Chair: Howard Foster, City University London, GB

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)
===================

- Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE
- Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
- Djamal Benslimane, LIRIS, FR
- Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
- Alena Buchalcevova, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Robert Castaneda, CustomWare, AU
- AnisCharfi, SAP Research CEC Darmstadt, DE
- Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
- Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
- Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
- Florian Daniel, University of Trento, IT
- Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
- Keith Duddy, Queensland University of Technology, AU
- Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
- Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
- Birgit Hofreiter, Hochschule Lichtenstein, LI
- Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, DE
- Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
- Agnes Koschmieder, University of Karlsruhe, DE
- Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
- E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
- Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
- Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
- Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
- CesarePautasso, Universitz of Lugano, CH
- Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
- Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, I
- Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
- Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
- Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
- Colette Rolland, University of Paris, FR
- Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
- Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU
- Olaf Zimmermann, IBM Research Zrich, CH

If you have further queries please email to the workshop chairs on:
chairs wesoa.org

Japanese Disaster Aid

Latest from the New York Times.

Please consider giving relief aid to Japan for the worst disaster since the second world war. Appended is a list of relief agencies accepting donations for Japanese relief work compiled by the Associated Press:

U.S. organizations accepting donations to assist Japan included:

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA)

Donations: 800-424-ADRA (2372)

Donations address: ADRA International, 12501 Old Columbia Pike, Silver Spring MD 20904

Website: http://www.adra.org

All Hands Volunteers

Donations: 919-830-3573

Donations address: PO Box 546, Carlisle MA 01741

Website: http://www.hands.org/donate/japan-tsunami

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

Donations: 212-687-6200

Donations address: 132 E. 43rd St PO Box 530, New York NY 10017

Website: http://jdc.org

American Red Cross

Donations: 1-800-RED-CROSS

Donations address: PO Box 37243, Washington DC 20013

Website: http://www.redcross.org

AmeriCares

Donations: 203-658-9500

Donations address: 88 Hamilton Ave, Stamford CT 06902

Website: http://americares.org

Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT)

Donations: 301-738-7122

Donations address: AMURT, 2502 Lindley Ter, Rockville MD 20850

Website: http://amurt.us

Baptist World Alliance/Baptist World Aid

Donations: 703-790-8980

Donations address: 405 N. Washington St, Falls Church VA 22046

Website: http://www.bwanet.org

Brother's Brother Foundation

Donations: 412-321-3160

Donations address: 1200 Galveston Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15233

Website: http://brothersbrother.org

Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation

Donations: 1-888-989-8244

Donations address: Tzu Chi USA HQ, 1100 S Valley Center Ave, San Dimas CA 91773

Website: http://www.us.tzuchi.org/usa/home.nsf/other/donateCharity

Catholic Relief Services

Donations: 1-877-HELP-CRS

Donations address: PO Box 17090, Baltimore MD 21203-7090

Website: http://crs.org

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee

Donations: 800-55-CRWRC

Donations address: CRWRC, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave SE, Grand Rapids MI 49560-0600

Website: http://www.crwrc.org

Church World Service

Donations: 1-800-297-1516

Donations address: PO Box 968, Elkhart IN 46515

Website: http://www.churchworldservice.org

Direct Relief International

Donations: 805-964-4767

Donations address: 27 S. La Patera Ln, Santa Barbara CA 93117

Website: http://www.DirectRelief.org

Giving Children Hope

Donations: 714-523-4454

Donations address: 8332 Commonwealth Ave, Buena Park CA 90621

Website: http://gchope.org

Habitat for Humanity International

Donations: 1-800-Habitat

Donations address: 270 Peachtree St NW Suite 1300, Atlanta GA 30303-1263

Website: http://habitat.org

International Medical Corps

Donations: 800-481-4462

Donations address: 1919 Santa Monica Blvd Suite 400, Santa Monica CA 90404

Website: http://internationalmedicalcorps.org

International Rescue Committee

Donations: 1-877-REFUGEE (733-8433)

Donations address: 122 E. 42nd St, New York NY 10168

Website: http://www.rescue.org

Mercy Corps

Donations: 800-852-2100

Donations address: Dept. NR, PO Box 2669, Portland OR 97208

Website: https://www.mercycorps.org/donate/japan

Operation Blessing

Donations: 800-730-2537

Donations address: 977 Centerville Tpke, Virginia Beach VA 23463

Website: http://www.operationblessing.org

Relief International

Donations: 310-478-1200

Donations address: 5455 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1280, Los Angeles CA 90036

Website: http://www.ri.org

Save the Children

Donations: 1-800-728-3843

Donations address: 54 Wilton Rd, Westport CT 06880

Website: http://savethechildren.org

World Vision, U.S.

Donations: 1-800-777-5777

Donations address: Federal Way, WA 98063

Website: http://www.worldvision.org

Source: InterAction, www.interaction.org

I'll note also IOCC, who we've had personal contact with and know their work is reliable:

Website: http://www.iocc.org

Money for nothing

A few years back I participated in a study on early stage investing in Russia - motivated by the fact that there is a lot of money staged by both the Russian government and Russian investors. What's become even more intriguing since then is the flow of Russian money to Silicon Valley investments - DST-Facebook investments getting the most attention recently. These high value deals are definitely bold and working - for now.

The latest news is the super cheap angel funding that Yuri Milner is engineering. Whether this is sustainable long term is hard to say, but this will surely shake things up around here for the foreseeable future. One thing is certain: the already hot startup environment just got a lot hotter.

Feedly: the iPhone just got a lot better

For several years, I've been using Feedly on my personal computer to quickly browse across lots of content from news feeds, blogs, and other sites of interest. It's been a very handy way to keep up on information from lots of sources without getting bogged down - scan lots of feed titles and previews and dive in on items that seem interesting.

But my usage patterns with Feedly have been uneven - primarily because I don't have much time to sit and scan on my pc - I'm either doing meetings, working on documents or trying to stay on top of email during the day. My "dead time" tends to be "in between" times like running between office buildings. That's when I'll check news feeds to see what's going on in industry or the world. Typically, it means manually browsing to reliable sites - which is not all that convenient.

Well, now Feedly is available on the iPhone and things just got a lot better for me. I can manage all my feeds through the desktop, but take advantage of very quickly scanning information over hundreds of sources. It's now virtually the only iPhone app that I use regularly and I don't lose any time. In fact, since I've been playing with it, I really haven't needed to open Safari at all. My only "wish" for Feedly is that the digest would show the latest feed entry for each source by title, which would save me some wasted navigation. For me, this is all about getting the right information to me quickly.

A seriously great app that bridges all my normal working environments seamlessly. Highly recommended - thanks Edwin and company for pulling this off!

WESOA 2010 - SF December 7th

This year, both the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing and the long running companion Workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications will be in San Francisco. I have had a long involvement with both as a program committee member, presenter and author and have always found them to be valuable as an attendee. I am particularly pleased this year that the program is in the bay area, as it is bound to bring out some very smart and very "plugged in" participants from the vendor community.

In any case, I'll be delivering the keynote presentation for the WESOA conference, so please stop by if you are there. I have not been able to attend in person since Amsterdam, so this will be a real pleasure and I hope to see you there.

Oracle SOA 11g Books

I'm impressed: a list of books that have been published for users of Oracle SOA and BPM portfolio products. I'm very proud to know many of the authors as friends and most of the developers.

Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developers Guide

The Definitive Guide to SOA Oracle Service Bus

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

OpenWorld Focus on SOA

Hope to see many long time and new friends and colleagues at Open World and JavaOne this year. Take a look at the Focus on SOA document to get oriented this year.

Warming Trends: a taste of things to come?

While I was in Moscow a few weeks back, the temperatures were stably higher than anything ever experienced in the history of record keeping: temperatures were literally unbearable. Traveling to India after that - where temperatures were thankfully cooler - I was impressed by exactly how difficult it will be for any country including more recently developed countries to put the brakes on the rate of increase of consumption of fossil fuels.

This brief news article describing the temperature trends and fires in Russia as a result of climate change is worth reading in its entirety. It does not do justice to the fires themselves and the havoc they are wreaking. A taste of things to come?

"Meteorologists say air temperature in central Russia by Friday might reach 41 degrees Celsius, which is likely to cause more forest fires in the region.

The recent sporadic rains in central Russian regions have not been brought by a cold weather front, so there is no hope for the drop of air temperatures, an official from the Russian meteorological service said yesterday.

“On the contrary, we expect that air temperature will go up to 41 degrees Celsius by Friday,” he added.

He also said that according to Internet-modelled forecasts, the weather might change after August 8, although such forecasts cannot be fully trusted. “The possibility of an error considerably increases starting from the forecast’s fifth day, so its accuracy nears zero by the eights day,” he said and once again confirmed that short-term forecasts testify to hot weather.

Meteorologists also say the winds are likely to change direction from south-eastern to south-western, thus bringing Mediterranean rains. Moreover, thanks to such winds smoke from peat-bog fires will go to less populated areas.

Meanwhile, according to the Russian Emergencies Ministry, a total of 227 wildfires were registered in central Russian regions in the past 24 hours. The bulk of fires, 130, were registered in the Moscow region, 48 was the tally in the Vladimir region, 9 in the Voronezh region, and another 9 in the Ryazan region. The total area hit by wildfires is 11,038 hectares. "

Source: The Hindu

ICSOC 2010

Just a brief note to remind people that the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing will be in the San Francisco Bay Area this year. I have for a long time worked with ICSOC - as a program committee member on the industrial track, in several workshops, panels and papers. It is the best conference combining industry and academic participants on the topic of service orientation in my opinion.

Russian Tech Center

More on the efforts to draw outside capital and pull back talent in the developing technical center outside Moscow, covered by the NY Times. I'm thinking that President Medvedev is a bit over-optimistic about the influence of word of mouth here...

A recap meeting on the American VC trip spotlighted in the Times article will be held this week in Palo Alto. Details linked.

Taterware

Another great green idea: disposable utensils made from potato starch and limestone. Breaks down in 60-90 days. They are using them at Oracle HQ cafeterias - I'm going to have to drop in and see how they perform.

One reason Exadata is so cool

Flash cache. This video barely scratches the surface, but Exadata is one of the best examples of hardware-meets-software done right.

Andrei Voznesensky, RIP

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky has just reposed. I always feel a special loss when we lose a poet of quality - the ability to speak to the human condition (not to say to understand it) is a remarkably rare thing, that requires the language of metaphor and analogy rather than forceful syllogisms. This is why poets are the only people that can provide us relief and protection from scientists, politicians and economists - the classes that I am a part of and that so often despise our humanity. Somehow this contrast was sharpened rather than lost in the revolution - I am thinking of many writers now, not just (or primarily) of Voznesensky.

One evening this week, I will try my hand at translating я Гойя ("I am Goya") and post the results, with apologies in advance for the damage I do. I may intersperse the phonetic Russian to give a feel for the force of the poem.

250 Million US PE in Skolkovo

Interesting play from Sigular Guff and Company - the deal centers on infrastructure and services for what will surely be an area with a high level of investment for IT.

Larry on Oracle+Sun

Gotta love the candor.

Brazilian growth outpacing India and China

For those in the Bay Area whose economic radar hasn't been working of late, Brazil's economy, the largest in South America, expanded by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2010, outpacing China and India. Click through to read the whole piece.

Oracle BPM 11gR1

April 27th marked the release of the Oracle BPM platform, which is, I believe, a bit more revolutionary than evolutionary for this space. I wanted to quickly copy some feedback from one of our partners (Hajo Normann - a SOA expert and ACE director - to give a feel for exactly what is differentiating about this product:

"“I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” "

The eternal problem with BPM has been the disconnect between business-user ease of use and the technological bridge to interface with real systems. Oracle's new BPM release starts to remove this barrier and is in many ways the first product set in the market to provide a truly integrated system for automating core business processes across human-centered workflows and IT systems.

JavaOne Call for Papers open

This year should be one of the most interesting in a decade.

Buzz opt out

Apologies for the mundane posting, but if you find the sudden appearance of Google Buzz has you thinking of dropping gmail - there is a "turn off buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail screen. It works just fine: glad to have it gone.

Haiti Aid

If you read this, please consider donating to help the victims of earthquake in Haiti. This blog entry links to the Red Cross.

Worthwhile bay area music - for families

I had the opportunity to attend a performance of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Sunday in a special performance aimed at children. Donato Cabrera conducted. The young performers really did an outstanding job: tight if not quite soulful, they exceeded my expectations. The overall program was great fun - interactive, with clapping and singing. The main classical settings featured works by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, two wonderful Russian composers. The capstone was a story-narration by Linda Ronstadt set to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Opus 67. If you have children these performances strike me as a great way to develop a love of great music and are highly recommended.

Our family is planning to attend (and sponsor) at least one of three upcoming performances in the bay area of a selection of Russian choral music (for which I have more than a soft spot). The concert is called NEVER SETTING LIGHT: A Day of Sacred Song in the Russian Choral Tradition and includes "a capella selections from the services of a liturgical day -- from sunset to sunrise. The ancient lyrics are set to the music of Russian and American choral masters from the 18th century to the present, including 5 pieces by northern California composers."

Performances:

Saturday, Feb. 20th Livermore - Asbury Methodist Church

Saturday, Feb 27th Oakland - Ascension Greek Cathedral

Sunday, Feb 28th Fremont - Mission San Jose

I expect these will be settings more traditional than, say, Rachmaninov's, Liturgy of St. John, but I am very much looking forward to these performances.

svod 2009

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference linking Russian technologists and Silicon Valley is scheduled for December 9-10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Prior year participants and speakers I've known for some time have been consistently impressed with this event.

http://www.svod.org/2009/announcement

OpenWorld 2009

This year's show has an almost electric feel to it: lots of enthusiasm and excitement about the 11g middleware offering, which is great to see up close. Kudos to Clemens Utschig for pulling together a great technical deep-dive session on SOA suite 11g today.

You can watch keynotes live or recorded by following this link.

Fusion Middleware 11g Kickoff - Moscow

The rollout for the Fusion Middleware 11g release in Moscow next week: I will be participating in the presentations. The Russian press release has the details. I'm very excited about the 11g release - it's technically compelling but it also contains important advances for delivering business value.

WESOA 09 Call for Papers

This year's workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications has been scheduled for November in Stockholm (still one of my favorite cities). Details follow - I will be working on the Program Committee again this year, so I'm looking forward to seeing submissions.

http://www.wesoa.org/

Many of today’s large-scale software projects in the area of distributed systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software architecture and technologies. For these projects, availability of sound software engineering principles, methodology and tool support is mission-critical. However, traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have led to the emergence of software service engineering (SSE) as a new specialist discipline, but research in this area is still immature and many open issues remain. There is an urgent need for research community and industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) of service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2009 workshop is the fifth in a series of workshops that focus on the specific aspects of SSE.


WESOA highlights key challenges of SSE that arise from specific characteristics of service-oriented applications that are often process-driven, loosely coupled, composed from autonomous services of complex IT landscapes and closely related to diverse socio-economic contexts. Service-oriented computing (SOC) enables the materialization of organizational processes as flexible compositions of autonomous service components. Stakeholders, domain experts, software architects and engineers instrument service-oriented software architectures (SOA) to drive constant organisational change by means of agile reengineering of software services, system landscapes and applications. In particular, service-oriented applications need to provide multiple, flexible and sometimes situational interaction channels within and beyond organizational structures and processes. Engineering of such software systems requires continuous, collaborative and cross-disciplinary development processes, methodologies and tools that synchronize multiple SDLCs of various SOA artefacts with organizational innovation processes.


Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics across multiple disciplines and to encourage participation of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In particular, collaboration will be fostered by means of a highly interactive and fast-paced workshop format.

Objectives

Topics

WESOA Series

WESOA'09 continues a successful series of former ICSOC workshops. During the past four editions, WESOA has demonstrated its relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants. Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers.

Publication

WESOA proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS Services Science Subline.

WESOA’09 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes papers that address challenges of SSE in general or in the context of specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

•Software service development lifecycle methodologies and processes
•Distributed and collaborative software service development
•Service-oriented reference models and frameworks
•Architectural styles and standards for software service systems
•Management and governance of SSE projects
•Models, languages and methods for service-oriented analysis and design
•Requirements-engineering for software service systems
•Service-oriented business process modelling
•SSE for cloud computing environments (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
•Validation, verification and testing of software service systems
•Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
•Model-driven SOA and service systems development
•Reverse engineering of software service systems
•Tool support for software service engineering
•Case studies and best practices of service-oriented development

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release

The 11g Middleware release has been released. Webcast of launch is here.

Principles of Transaction Processing, Second Edition

I wanted to put out a brief note that the new version of Principles of Transaction Processing is hot off the presses. Simply put, this book is the standard reference for getting your brain around the transaction processing components of the IT landscape. It was the book I absorbed when I first started working on implementing transaction managers and one I turned to get up the speed on existing systems. I had a chance to review part of the book prior to publication, so I was lucky enough to get a free copy - Eric and Phil did a great job bringing the text up to date: it remains one of the handful of books that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in information systems implementation or management.

Russia and Web 2.0

Zdrasvoyteye.

When I was in Moscow last, a lot of the talk was centered around attracting foreign capital to tech investments in Russia. The pitch is - or should be - familiar: lower costs, big market, super-bright engineers and scientists. The downside is lack of transparency and a very unique business environment that is difficult (or impossible) to navigate as an outsider. Today's announcement that Facebook has taken $200 million at first looks like a kind of a reversal in this trend: tech oriented Russians still have capital to deploy and may be choosing to spend it on bargain opportunities in the US market, which remains preeminent in technology development.

A closer look, though, suggests this is a part of a trend that has been gaining steam. Russians have been developing and investing in Web technology for a long while. Yes, Google was co-founded by a Russian, but there has been a number of interesting developments based in Russia itself. The Russian firm Yandex is often described as the "Russian Google" and has picked up small Russian social networking companies like Moi Krug on the cheap (someday there long awaited IPO will happen). SUP, run by American-in-Moscow Andrew Paulson, picked up LiveJournal to support their Russian users, and now Yuri Milner's fund takes a position in Facebook. Milner is the founder of mail.ru, a former physicist, and Wharton alumn.

Watch carefully: the Russians are coming to Silicon Valley and it's been a largely under-noted trend. I've met some of these folks and they are very capable businessmen.

Events for SCA

InfoQ has a short synopsis of the event proposal that was released to add pub-sub style semantics to the SCA assembly model. The genesis of this lies in some ESB related work I had helped lead at Oracle back in the days when we first started to develop the SCA specifications - it took a long time to socialize this to the working group, but I'm very happy to see that that work has borne fruit. This fills an important gap in the specifications - previously, the wire driven semantics forced components to "externalize" pub-sub interactions in a way that was divorced from the SCA semantics - and is broadly applicable to many problem domains including Complex Event Processing, Queue/Pub-Sub style integration, and ESB scenarios.

I remain somewhat distressed over the way the channel abstraction has played out - the original idea divorced much of this from the assembly view and made it an aspect of system configuration. I think the current approach artificially mixes orthogonal aspects of the problem space. Having said that, this is a milestone for the specification and completes the basic assembly model nicely.

By the way, nice write up Boris!

Value at Risk

I'm not going to editorialize on this one: here's a layperson accessible view of the risk models that worked so remarkably poorly in the last several years.

Darwin Dissected

Though it may be impossible to miss, this year commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who has justly been called the father of modern biology for this development of the theory of the evolutionary development of species. At times contentious, the fact of evolution has been long established beyond any kind of reasonable doubt - all schools of scientific knowledge are convergent in this regard. But to understand the true importance of evolution for biology as a whole, one of my favorite essays is by Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

In any case, I happen to find myself reading a facsimile of the original edition of On the Origin of Species - which I have had for many years but never read end to end. Coincidentally, the New York Times has a posted a great selection of passages by Darwin: read and enjoy.

When Finance Goes Mad

Having come uncomfortably close to working in the packaging of structured financial investments, I've been morbidly fascinated by the way in which it has led to the near-destruction of the national - if not global - economy. Here is a great article on how badly awry things went with the ratings on these instruments, and a bit of what that means for stabilizing things.

Happy New Year

I wanted to take just a moment and wish everyone a safe, happy and peaceful holiday season and new year. All the best to you and yours.

Liquidity Trap

As the fed's latest cut pushes funds target rates toward zero, I am shocked that the news is not focused on whether the US faces a liquidity trap. Instead, there is very little discussion and markets seem to be neutral on the latest news.

The article I linked here is interesting for two reasons: one, it looks into the basic issues in some depth; two, it is clear that no one really understands what is happening. Note that Bruce Bartlett is arguing that the biggest danger we face now is deflation. Maybe. But two months ago, the biggest danger we faced was inflation: the latest swings in price indices seem more related to runaway boom-bust cycles in energy and commodities - too soon to really know what we face. Time will tell, of course, but only in a backward looking sense. At that point, we'll be passed the point where we needed the information.

Gimme Shelter

Wild turkeys sensing Thanksgiving is nearly upon us gather in a safe place: my front lawn.

Budapester

After several years of delay, my wife and I finally had a chance to spend a long anticipated weekend in Budapest, Hungary. I'll give my impressions in three parts: aesthetic, economic and historical. Second - for those anticipating a visit - a few suggestions for tourists.



On several occasions, the first question I've gotten about Budapest is "what's it like?" To be frank, I've struggled to compare it to other central European cities I've visited: unlike, say, Prague, the oldest portions of Budapest are quite small: the city was the scene of many battles from the Turkish occupation through the second world war; in the latter, the Soviet army and the Nazi army clashed directly in the
city itself. With some notable exceptions, the city is redolent with 19th century facades. In fact, many of the buildings are quite impressive. My wife commented that to see Budapest, one has to be constantly looking upward.



Although it is hard to say exactly how any country is going to weather the current economic storm, Hungary has clearly experienced strong growth rates in recent years. Budapest itself reflects both a low post-Soviet starting point and the economic boom of recent years. Elegant restaurants are close to classic looking buildings suffering
from disrepair. Pricing is erratic at best. One can find a 1 USD cup of coffee, or spend 12 USD for coffee and pastry, all within a block. For a great view of the food of Hungary, traditional restaurants and the Central Market in Pest are great experiences: be prepared for tons of paprika.



A traditional breakfast at the Central Market!

The standard tourist circuit is worth doing. Budapest's museums are interesting though modest: meaning, it is possible to explore many in a day's time. There are several houses of worship that are worth visiting; in particular I recommend the Matyas Church in Old Buda and the Great Synagogue in Pest.



Matyas.

The Great Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world. The building is a 19th century construction and features continental Christian influence in features such as a (substantial) pipe organ: the same instrument is present in the even more beautiful Spanish Synagogue in Prague.



Time permitting, there is a modest Serbian Orthodox church on Szerb Utra ("Serb Street"), with an older iconostasis and the sweet smell of incense hanging in the air. The famous St. Stephen's cathedral is beautiful but also very modern.

And of course Budapest is famous for the public baths. We visited the baths in the central park, which is an experience not to miss. There are consultants available that will help construct a therapeutic regime while you are there, though we opted to wing it: both relaxing and revitalizing. Be forewarned: the plunge pool may not have ice crystals in the water, but it is … cold.

There are two less well-known options for visitors that I wanted to point out. First, the Terror Museum in Pest is a must-see. The Hungarians suffered under both a Nazi putsch and Soviet occupation. The Terror Museum is set in the secret police headquarters (shared by both regimes) and provides a bracing portrait of totalitarian terror as seen from the Hungarian experience. The first exhibit in the museum
was perhaps the most moving: videos of cheering and weeping crowds supporting both regimes cutting abruptly to the destruction and death concomitant with their rises. This was not an uplifting part of our visit, but a sobering and necessary look at two forms of evil.



The second thing to note about Budapest is the excellent restaurant scene. We had some of the best meals we have had in a long time in Pest. The restaurant Tigris near St. Stephen's Cathedral has fantastic food, wine and the most enthusiastic staff I've ever encountered. The "contemporary Hungarian" tasting menu at Babel was great: the chef
has a deft take on gastronomical science. Try both if you can.

The title of this post is taken from the iconic Vass shoe, the somewhat awkward looking, central European classic. The factory store is on Harris Kos in Pest and worth a visit for anyone interested in old world craftsmanship. There's a romanticism about much of Budapest tied up with the ubiquitous craftsmanship to be found.



All photos by Ruth Pavlik: they may not be used without permission.

Wild Ride

What an extraordinary few weeks we've been through economically. The economic system has started to unzip and then snap back several times: the scariest thing I saw was the more than doubling of the LIBOR rate over night. And the control of short sales is a step to nationalizing equity markets: incredible! And while, things continue to adjust and move forward, we are, for better or worse, living through an inflection point in economic history.

I was in Moscow, Russia a few weeks back when the Russian central bank had to intervene to support the ruble. At that point, cooler heads seemed to have been regaining center stage and the political climate between the US and Russia seemed to warming a bit since the Georgia conflict. Then, right before I left, a US vice president candidate speculated that we might have to go to war with Russia! A week later, the Russian markets closed for several days. I'll have a report on my Russia trip in a few days, but I'll preface it by saying it was fascinating.

I escaped the economic chatter last week by attending Oracle's Open World conference. This was by far the best Open World I have seen: customers were very enthusiastic and the show was extremely well coordinated. Getting back to core technology was a great break from some of the bleaker world news. I arrived home late Saturday and then was back on a plane this morning: only to learn that Wachovia had been dispatched!

Deika Morrison blog

I wanted to point readers to the new blog of a friend of mine, Deika Morrison. She has an extremely interesting background: she served as a Senator and Minister of State for Finance and Planning for the country of Jamaica, is a business expert, and is a careful thinker. She's also one of the nicest people I know.

I continue to believe that so-called emerging markets are the well spring of innovative ideas in economics and business. Brazil, Israel, Russia, China, Jamaica are all interesting places where necessity has proven to be the mother not just of invention but innovation: Deika's blog should help illustrate what I mean.

SVOD: Tech Sector in Russia

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference has been scheduled, the dates are November 20-21. This is the premiere opportunity to learn about the technology sector and venture capital opportunities in and around Russia and understand more about what is happening with Russian companies. Hope to see you there.

Give Back/Help Out

I (slightly) modified the right hand side of my blog to include some charities that I support. In some cases, I have good friends that have dedicated their professional lives to helping to build these organizations.

These don't even begin to scratch the surface of great organizations that offer great ways to help others. I listed these because I know a bit more about them personally and I'm confident that they do good (efficiently!). Another good friend, Edwin, recently added a blog post on Abilities United, which works with kids experiencing challenges in development and gives them special attention based on their needs. Take a careful look at Abilities United: they deserve support and all the help they can get.

Cisco launches Russia/CIS fund

Brent Marcus left a note that Cisco recently announced a Russia focused venture fund. I will be in Moscow in a few weeks and will try to get some first hand information to blog about.

Data grids and the Web

There's been a lot of talk recently about web 2.0, social networks, and cloud computing. To my way of thinking, these are very much overlapping categories. One useful technology that can be used support all of these models is the concept of a "data grid": high performance, distributed and reliable caching technology. On-Demand Enterprise has a good profile of AbeBooks.com, which uses Oracle Coherence technology to support their web site.

The First Rome

I spent the last two weeks on holiday in Italy. This was the first time I've taken two weeks off from work in nearly 20 years, so this felt like a much needed break. We traveled to Rome for several days, then on to the Amalfi coast, and across the country to Romagna and then spent our last few days in Venice. Three things struck me about Italy: the warm and passionate people, the incredible food, and the rich cultural and religious history that one encounters – in many ways is confronted with – throughout the country. Here are a few of photos and some thoughts along the way.

Rome sits under waves of consecutive civilizations. There is the indelible imprint of the Greek, Roman, early Christian, Byzantine, Gothic, Frankish, and ultimately modern world in Rome. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that you could spend many lifetimes absorbed in studying the remnants of each: the city is history alive. Our hotel was right down the street from the Colosseum: to best grasp the complexity of the operations of the Colosseum, you need to walk the insides. From here, you can see something of the scale, still impressive in a modern city. Many of the blood sport scenes involved animals that were kept below the center of the stadium. You can see the basic layout in this photo.



The next photo is the Arch of Constantine, the emperor that in many ways was responsible for the Christianity Europe still knows it today: he called the first Ecumenical Council at Nicea in 364 AD, which established the basic dogmatic creed for the faith. The arch also illustrates the engineering prowess of the Romans: note also that Italy still runs potable fountains throughout the city that were based on the acquaducts established by the Romans as well.



We visited the Vatican, including St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum. What an incredible wealth of Renaissance art. The scale of St. Peter's is awe inspiring, though the artistic motif is very much humanist. The church retains the old style of a domed church, so common in the Byzantine tradition; inside each dome is an elaborate series of paintings:



A haunting view of St. Peter in Glory (the dove represents the Holy Spirit):



It was, however, the Vatican Museum, that most impressed and surprised me by its scale and beauty. As we were touring with child, we had to move rather quickly through the museum to visit the Sistine Chapel, our top target. However, here is a view of one of the corridors leading through the museum. The museum is one of the main things in Rome I'd like to return to visit for a few days of sustained study:



When we left Rome, we traveled to the Amalfi coast for the better part of five days, partially for relaxation. A snapshot of the beach area below the cliff into which our hotel (La Terrazze: highly recommended for both location and the dinners) was built.



Here is the exterior of St. Andrea's Cathedral in Amalfi: note the cultural interplay between Byzantine and Arabesque styling; Amalfi was once a major port city and trading center in the Mediterranean.



A closeup of the mosaics of the twelve apostles, again, Byzantine in style.



The American novelist Gore Vidal described Ravello as the most beautiful place he had visited in all his travels. I concur. The church of St. Panteleone on the main piazza contained several throwbacks to early Christianity: the blood relics of Panteleone from 306 AD and an old icon of the virgin Mary. This seems to me to echo the early apostolic churches, which transferred dogma through liturgy, iconography and the veneration of saints, rather than scripture (the New Testament canon had not yet been formed at the time of Panteleone). Here are some fresco remains with an air of antiquity:



We spent several days in Romagna, a great family destination for relaxing on the Adriatic beaches. We explored the medieval hill towns by car. Stunning vistas overlooking valleys, olive groves and vineyards.



After Romagna, we had a few days in Venice. A remarkable city, though after a few days, we were glad to escape the throngs of tourists. Venice is a place to explore for three reasons: history, art and architecture. San Marco Basilica combines all three and is rightly considered the centerpiece of the city. Here are some external shots of Venice (photos in the interior of San Marco are forbidden, but the interior mosaics are stunning).





Switching gears: if the export of tourists is any indicator of macroeconomic conditions, pay attention to Venice. The tourists from Europe were, as always, predominantly German. But I was stunned by the throngs of Russian tourists, something I rarely encountered five years ago. Similarly, Japanese tourists still lead the visitors from Asia, but they were joined by lots of visitors from China. Of course, China and Russia have both been doing well, so perhaps this is evidence of well-known trends.

All photos by Ruth Pavlik; no photos may be reused without permission.

Solzhenitsyn remembered

I read Solzhenitsyn relatively late, much later than I should have. For me, his work will always serve as a warning about how readily humans can be trapped in a cycle of cruelty and exploitation: both as exploited and exploiters. I read dozens on essays remembering Solzhenitsyn over the last few days; I thought this piece from der Speigel captured the Western perspective quite well: he was never really understood by those who received him in exile, that he was sometimes thoroughly wrong headed, and that he was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the last century.

WESOA 08 Workshop (second CFP)

S E C O N D C A L L F O R P A P E R S

4th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
"SERVICE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN" (WESOA'08)

In conjunction with the 6th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2008) http://www.icsoc.org/

Sydney, Australia, December 1st, 2008

WESOA Workshop Website http://www.wesoa.org/

Abstract Submission Due: Oct. 1st, 2008


OBJECTIVES
==========

In large-scale software projects that increasingly adopt
service-oriented software architecture and technologies, availability
of sound systems engineering principles, -methodology and -tools for
service-oriented applications is mission-critical for project success.
However, engineering service-oriented applications poses specific
requirements that differ from traditional software engineering and
service systems engineering (SSE) is not yet established.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering
principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software
development lifecycle of service-oriented applications.

The WESOA series of workshops addresses challenges of service systems
engineering that arise from unique characteristics of service-oriented
applications. Service-oriented applications closely resemble the
organisation principles of their application domains that are often
process-driven networks. They are compositions of service system
components that are provided by autonomous stakeholders based on
unique assets and capabilities. Therefore, service-oriented
applications often have a social dimension and can be regarded as
constituents of social service communities. It is the challenge of
service systems engineering to not only cope with these specific
circumstances but to capitalise on them with radically new approaches.
The WESOA series addresses these challenges and particularly
concentrates on the aspects of service-oriented analysis and design
that provide principles methodology and tool support to capture the
characteristic requirements of networked service communities and
transform them into reusable high-quality service system designs that
underpin and drive the holistic service-oriented development
lifecycle.

WESOA'08 continues a successful series of former ICSOC
workshops. During the past three editions, WESOA has demonstrated its
relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants.
Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers
that regularly satisfied requirements of Springer and led to a special
issue of IJCSSE.

TOPICS
======

WESOA'08 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address challenges of service-oriented systems
engineering, analysis and design in general or in the context of
specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not
limited to the following:

* Service systems development lifecycle methodologies
* Service-oriented reference models and modelling frameworks
* Service-oriented analysis and design patterns
* Models, languages and methods for service-oriented domain analysis
* Analysis and design for service-based organisations, social networks
and communities
* Requirements-engineering for service systems
* Service-oriented business processes modelling
* Engineering methods for design of reusable and composable services
* Service-oriented analysis and design for grid-computing, e-Science
and cloud computing
* Architectural styles and standards for service systems
* Contract and policy design for service systems
* Design of service systems choreography and orchestration
* Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
* Validation and verification of service systems
* Tools support for analysis and design of service systems
* Model-driven SOA and service systems development
* Case studies and best practices of service-oriented analysis, design
and development

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research papers. Papers should be written in English and must not
exceed 12 pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the
WESOA conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and
circulated to participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings
will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the ICSOC conference to be found on their website
http://www.icsoc.org/.

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

* Abstract Submission Due: October 1, 2008
* Paper Submission Due: October 6, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: November 3, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: November 24, 2008
* Workshop Date: December 1, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

* Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
* Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
* Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
* Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
* Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
* Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, ES
* Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
* Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, GB
* George Feuerlicht, Sydney University of Technology, AU
* Stefan Fischer, University of Luebeck, DE
* Howard Foster, Imperial College London, GB
* Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
* Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
* Bernd Krämer, Fernuniversität Hagen, DE
* Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
* Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, US
* Tiziana Margaria-Steffen, University of Potsdam , DE
* E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
* Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
* Harald Meyer, HPI Potsdam, DE
* Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
* Josef Noll, Telenor R&D, NO
* Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot, University of Extremadura, ES
* Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, IT
* Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
* Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
* Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, DE
* Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
* Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, AT
* Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
* Walid Gaaloul, DERI Galway, IE
* Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU

Catching Up

Between work and holiday, I haven't been able to post much to the blog over the last 6 weeks. I am going to do a series of updates. Outside of work, I've been thinking a bit about the future of the web architecture, emerging markets and human social and religious history: post coming up related to all topics.

1) I was out of the country when Feedly was rolled out. I will talk about Feedly, why it is important and do a series of reviews on the technology.

2) I am hoping to publish details on a venture fund investing in Africa that I think will be quite interesting in the near future.

3) A longish entry on my recent holiday in Italy, including "the first Rome" is in the works.

Hope all that is of interest.

WESOA 08 Workshop

In general, WESOA is a productive exchange of experiences and ideas. I am reviewing papers again this year for the program committee and I encourage you to consider writing up a paper that covers practical experiences in SOA implementations and applications.

C A L L F O R P A P E R S

4th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
"SERVICE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN" (WESOA'08)

In conjunction with the 6th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2008) http://www.icsoc.org/

Sydney, Australia, December 1st, 2008

WESOA Workshop Website http://www.wesoa.org/

Abstract Submission Due: Sep. 1st, 2008


OBJECTIVES
==========

In large-scale software projects that increasingly adopt
service-oriented software architecture and technologies, availability
of sound systems engineering principles, -methodology and -tools for
service-oriented applications is mission-critical for project success.
However, engineering service-oriented applications poses specific
requirements that differ from traditional software engineering and
service systems engineering (SSE) is not yet established.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering
principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software
development lifecycle of service-oriented applications.

The WESOA series of workshops addresses challenges of service systems
engineering that arise from unique characteristics of service-oriented
applications. Service-oriented applications closely resemble the
organisation principles of their application domains that are often
process-driven networks. They are compositions of service system
components that are provided by autonomous stakeholders based on
unique assets and capabilities. Therefore, service-oriented
applications often have a social dimension and can be regarded as
constituents of social service communities. It is the challenge of
service systems engineering to not only cope with these specific
circumstances but to capitalise on them with radically new approaches.
The WESOA series addresses these challenges and particularly
concentrates on the aspects of service-oriented analysis and design
that provide principles methodology and tool support to capture the
characteristic requirements of networked service communities and
transform them into reusable high-quality service system designs that
underpin and drive the holistic service-oriented development
lifecycle.

WESOA'08 continues a successful series of former ICSOC
workshops. During the past three editions, WESOA has demonstrated its
relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants.
Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers
that regularly satisfied requirements of Springer and led to a special
issue of IJCSSE.

TOPICS
======

WESOA'08 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address challenges of service-oriented systems
engineering, analysis and design in general or in the context of
specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not
limited to the following:

* Service systems development lifecycle methodologies
* Service-oriented reference models and modelling frameworks
* Service-oriented analysis and design patterns
* Models, languages and methods for service-oriented domain analysis
* Analysis and design for service-based organisations, social networks
and communities
* Requirements-engineering for service systems
* Service-oriented business processes modelling
* Engineering methods for design of reusable and composable services
* Service-oriented analysis and design for grid-computing, e-Science
and cloud computing
* Architectural styles and standards for service systems
* Contract and policy design for service systems
* Design of service systems choreography and orchestration
* Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
* Validation and verification of service systems
* Tools support for analysis and design of service systems
* Model-driven SOA and service systems development
* Case studies and best practices of service-oriented analysis, design
and development

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research papers. Papers should be written in English and must not
exceed 12 pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the
WESOA conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and
circulated to participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings
will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the ICSOC conference to be found on their website
http://www.icsoc.org/.

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

* Abstract Submission Due: September 1, 2008
* Paper Submission Due: October 6, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: November 3, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: November 24, 2008
* Workshop Date: December 1, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

* Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
* Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
* Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
* Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
* Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
* Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, ES
* Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
* Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, GB
* George Feuerlicht, Sydney University of Technology, AU
* Stefan Fischer, University of Luebeck, DE
* Howard Foster, Imperial College London, GB
* Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
* Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
* Bernd Krämer, Fernuniversität Hagen, DE
* Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
* Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, US
* Tiziana Margaria-Steffen, University of Potsdam , DE
* E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
* Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
* Harald Meyer, HPI Potsdam, DE
* Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
* Josef Noll, Telenor R&D, NO
* Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot, University of Extremadura, ES
* Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, IT
* Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
* Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
* Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, DE
* Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
* Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, AT
* Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
* Walid Gaaloul, DERI Galway, IE
* Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU
* Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
====================

Jen-Yao Chung
IBM T.J. Watson Research, USA

Wolfgang Emmerich
University College London, UK

Guadalupe Ortiz
University of Extremadura, Spain

Christian Zirpins
University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

If you have further queries please email to the workshop chairs on:
chairs wesoa.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Dr. Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Extremadura

gobellot@unex.es
http://personales.ya.com/gobellot/

Quercus Software Engineering Group
http://quercusseg.unex.es

Silicon Valley Open Doors

The SVOD 08 conference is now set for November 13-14. This conference looks at Russian venture opportunities, focused on early stage companies and technology. It's the premiere event in the US of its kind: if you have an interest in early stage companies eastern Europe or Russia, plan for this event.

JavaOne 2008

I was supposed to be a panelist for BOF 5846, a session organized by my friend Mark Little, exploring how OSGi informs SOA implementations and strategies. Unfortunately, I had to cancel out due to travel conflicts, but stop by the BOF at the show if you are there. Alex Alves from BEA (now Oracle too) will be taking my slot and talking about his experience using OSGi as the substructure of the BEA Event Server.

Also, in case you missed Thomas Kurian's keynote this morning, the JavaOne site is hosting some video clips: this clip, which features Kevin Clugage showing off the SOA platform preview's SCA support and Mike Lehmann demonstrating WebLogic's operations console and JRockit realtime. Both are definitely worth watching.

DOA 08 Call For Papers Reminder

I am co-chairing the middleware track for the OTM conference in Mexico this year. Take a look at the Call for Papers: I'm hoping to see some good submissions.

OTM 2008 Federated Conferences - Call For Papers
Monterry (Mexico), November 9 - 14, 2008
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/

BRIEF OVERVIEW

"OnTheMove (OTM) to Meaningful Internet Systems and Ubiquitous Computing"
co-locates five successful related and complementary conferences:
- International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA'08)
- International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of
Semantics (ODBASE'08)
- International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'08)
- International Symposium on Grid computing, high-performAnce and Distributed
Applications (GADA'08)
- International Symposium on Information Security (IS'08)

Each conference covers multiple research vectors, viz. theory (e.g. underlying
formalisms), conceptual (e.g. technical designs and conceptual solutions) and
applications (e.g. case studies and industrial best practices). All five
conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and
ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting
application-pull created by the WWW.

PAPER SUBMISSION SITE
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=submit

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

- Abstract submission: June 8, 2008
- Paper submission: June 15, 2008
- Acceptance notification: August 10, 2008
- Camera ready: August 25, 2008
- Registration: August 25, 2008
- OTM Conferences: November 9 - 14, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS

CoopIS PC Co-Chairs (coopis2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Johann Eder, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
* Masaru Kitsuregawa, University of Tokyo, Japan
* Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

DOA PC Co-Chairs (doa2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
* Alberto Montresor, University of Trento, Italy
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, USA

ODBASE PC Co-Chairs (odbase2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Malu Castellanos, HP, USA
* Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
* Feng Ling, Tsinghua University, China

GADA PC Co-Chairs (gada2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, USA
* Pilar Herrero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
* Daniel S. Katz, Louisiana State University, USA
* María S. Pérez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

IS PC Co-Chairs (is2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Jong Hyuk Park, Kyungnam University, Korea
* Bart Preneel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* Ravi Sandhu, University of Texas, USA
* André Zúquete, University of Aveiro, Portugal

Israeli Startups Part Two

A follow on panel May 1 in Palo Alto discussing successful tech companies birthed in Israel.

Darwin Online

I'm a part time science buff, by which I mean I enjoy science but don't always have bandwidth to stay up on science news. However, present work necessarily builds on the past and it's always a pleasure to spend time looking back at the history of science. I recently discovered this very cool repository of the complete works of Charles Darwin. It's humbling to realize the number of fundamental insights that Darwin was able to decipher from this observations: he was truly one of history's great geniuses. Nature recently ran a wonderful story on Darwin's key contributions to current scientific understanding, though it unfortunately requires a subscription.

Russian millionare count soaring

Kommersant reports that the number of Russian millionaires is now greater than the number of Indian millionaires. I had to do a double take on this: the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of India is economic growth and transformation. Perhaps that is giving India a bit of short change, since it also boasts a rich cultural and religious history that has influenced large swaths of the globe.

To an extent, this reinforces my belief that Russia is the hidden gem in so-called emerging markets at the moment. While this may be a cause for celebration, it is also a cause for concern: take a deeper look and you'll find that the wealth is being generated predominantly in connection with extractive industries. This means the economy is vulnerable to price pullbacks in commodities and not structured to experience the kind of explosive and sustainable growth associated with technology and intellectual industries. Extraction based economies have had a devil of a time diversifying. The Kremlin is looking to address this in fits and starts (see previous posts that look at some of initiatives of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade), but it is a decisive matter for the future of the Russian economy that will influence the country for generations to come.

In the meantime, I believe India is doing a lot of the right things, especially by building industry (and wealth) organically, based on intellectual capital. They are still leading the way for emerging markets and in some ways for everyone.

Coaldale History

I got feedback from several people interested in coal mining history in Pennsylvania based on my previous blog entry, none of whom I know: it's amazing how many random connections you get from Web searches. In any case, I wanted to link to a really interesting set of articles that traces the history of the region around Coaldale in its early stage, including the tensions that existed in the mining communities. I remember hearing stories as a kid about the "Black Marias" that would drop off the bodies of miners after an accident.

The source site is an interesting assembly of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant histories, which is part of the background on my grandmother's side. By her generation, everyone seemed to think of themselves generically as Russian, but the background of many was more diverse and our family has a variety of Eastern Slavic traditions. For example, most of the Pascha activities I remember best were heavily influenced by the traditions of Ukraine.

The Carpatho-Rusyn ethnic group is not well known. As a matter of interest, here's a link to an overview of their history. Many were probably Uniate or so-called Greek Catholics, though in the US they were poorly received by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church and I believe many moved back after centuries to the Eastern Orthodox church, specifically under the autocephalous church in Moscow. Other Eastern European ethnic groups in the region included, according the the New York Times, Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Russians, Jews and Hungarians. The derogatory term "Hunky" was a generic reference to Eastern European immigrants in this region, derived from the fact that many of the immigrants were believed to have migrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Thinking of an MBA?

Seems like perceptions of the worth of an MBA are highly cyclical, but there's no doubt that a good business school has a lot to offer for professional development. I chose to go back for an MBA after a specific experience: I realized that I really didn't understand VC term sheets or the underlying financial models when I really needed to know what I was dealing with.

Once you decide you want an MBA, you have to decide where you want to go. I looked in the US and ultimately only applied to one school. It's been understood for a while that European business schools are very good. As BusinessWeek notes, they are getting progressively better: they also offer an attractive alternative to American schools for professionals that plan to invest their professional life outside the US.

The other thing that is striking: business schools are becoming a sign of economic sophistication in economies that not too long ago were devoid of private business altogether. I am happy to see new schools developing in Eastern Europe. BusinessWeek also provides an interesting peek at Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a new B-school being built in Russia and a key development in the maturation of the Russian economy. I've been spending a lot of time on a study of the Russian business environment, and I can tell you that many managers are very excited about this.

It may be that my age has something to do with it, but I find that many of my friends are asking me if they should consider an MBA. At some point, I'll give my thoughts on the chief benefits of an MBA, at least based on my first-hand experiences. Whether the investment (the time investment is likely to be the most dear) is worth it is a deeply personal decision, but maybe I can add some insight. Though I believe that Wharton remains the best business school in the world, I think that prospective B-school students should look at a number of options and I would put international schools on the top of the list.

A Small World After All

I was doing some browsing and stumbled on this video that shows my great-uncle's house collapsing into an abandoned coal mine in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Coaldale. A great metaphor for the decline of the region, with a personal twist.

Coal mining was hard work and often lead to a very short life. If you happen to be in the vicinity of the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania at some point, I recommend visiting the Eckley Miner's village for an historical perspective on the mining life. My great grandfather was fortunate, as he was able to run his own contract mining crew (not bad for someone that arrived in the US without any adults around the age of 10, speaking only Russian), though he ultimately died of mining related lung disease. My grandfather was doubly fortunate, as he was able to leave the region without working in the mines and before the economic base collapsed.

I don't know who posted the YouTube videos on Coaldale, but they are quite interesting on a personal level. In the business and church video, you can see a quick snapshot of St. Mary's Russian Orthodox church, which my great grandfather helped to build. The last time I was there was for a funeral when I was a child, but I believe it is still there and still functioning. This video is also a neat reminder of what small town America used to be like.

Social Not-working?

Some former colleagues, both old and more recent, have started a company called Ringside Networks, building a platform to integrate and host social networking technologies within corporate web sites. The company is releasing part of the source code on an open source model to drive adoption, so check them out: there's no cost and lots of transparency. I like the fact that new business models are emerging for startups, though the exit options are limited to acquisition, valuations have been high for companies with open source products that have gained scale.

In this case, the business model is doubly interesting, as it aims at a hybrid of SaaS and in-house technologies: part of the pitch is that social applications are too important to be captive to third-parties. If large companies (especially retailers) find that they want more ownership of their customers, this may be a very interesting play.

Cetaceans among us

I had a chance to take my family on a three hour whale watch chartered out of Half Moon Bay on Sunday. After about an hour we wound up spotting several gray whales; baleen whales that I am told can grow to as large as 14 feet. For the most part, we were seeing the smoke-like "poof" of the whale expelling through its blow hole. My daughter was able to spot the fluke at one point. Then, suddenly, the larger gray jumped out of the water, exposing the majority of the whale's body to view. Amazing.

We did not get a picture of the whale, as each spotting was quite sudden. However, the overall effect was considerably more dramatic than the spotting photo I have linked to from Wikipedia.

On a slightly related topic, the migration of the blow hole to its present position on the whale's head is one of the more interesting parts of aquatic evolution.

Israeli Startup Panel (This Week!)

There's a panel in the Palo Alto area this week looking at Israeli startups with ties to silicon valley, organized by a local group CoolTech, this week. Israel (Tel Aviv in particular) is one of the few places that has been successful in transplanting the "American" venture capital model. Clearly, enlightened government policies had a formative influence on venture capital development in Israel, as did a business culture tolerant of risk and failure; it is also an incredibly exuberant business environment. In fact, when talking with Israeli VCs, I'm struck by how similar their outlook is to American VCs. And yet, there is undoubtedly more to the story. Israel's domestic market is small and the target for intellectual property is invariably external markets. The differences may in fact be more important than the similarities, since they open up new channels for discovering innovative business models. For that reason, Israel is an essential case study for economies around the globe that aspire to a dynamic technology marketplace.

Creative Thinking in Private Equity

I recently had a chance to attend a meeting with a partner from Aventura Investment Partners as a part of a Wharton program looking at private equity in emerging markets, an area that I find extremely exciting. Aventura is doing several investments in Senegal, targeted at the value chain around agricultural production and also in health care. I can't go into the business models they are using right now, but there is some very innovative thinking required to bring development to areas like rural Senegal. As one of my Nigerian friends recently commented to me, traditional "aid" just hasn't worked. This is the kind of private initiative that has the chance to make dramatic and sustainable changes in a society. I imagine we will see a lot more funds take on challenges around development, especially if projects like these have success.

Civic Pride

Shamong was rated the 6th best town in New Jersey Magazine this year, owing no doubt partially to the fact that it is an attractive, quiet place, with a lot of nice people. Philadelphia magazine also showed that Shamong was one of the best residential towns in South Jersey for homeowners.

Gulag Archipelago

I try to read at least one novel a month to keep myself sane. Last month, I stumbled on an old hardback copy of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which I picked up for 2 dollars in a used book store in New York City some 15 years ago and lost along the way. A riveting book that should serve as a reminder that humans are not inherently good. The book is a bit like reading Kafka's The Trial, until you realize it is not literature but a documentary.