Service oriented computing is an emerging cross-disciplinary paradigm for distributed computing that is changing the way software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed.

ICSOC'08 builds on the success of previous conferences in this series, establishing bridges between established and new service research and applications communities and fostering cross-community scientific excellence. Our goal is to bring together ideas and technologies from many different fields in an evolutionary manner, to address research challenges such as service composition, discovery, integration, monitoring and management of services, service quality and security, methodologies for supporting service development, governance in their evolution, as well as their overall life-cycle management. This year, we are focusing on building bridges with the business community because of its ongoing contribution to the emerging field of Services Science.

ICSOC 2008 seeks original papers in the field of service oriented computing, from theoretical and foundational results to empirical evaluations as well as practical and industrial experiences, with the emphasis on results that contribute to solving the many still open research problems that are of significant importance to the field of service oriented applications. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

Services Foundations: Formal and precise definitions of the notion of service, specification and modeling techniques for services, model-driven service development, functional and non-functional quality aspects, formal composition relations, risk assessment and quality assurance, refinement and refactoring, programming and runtime models, compatibility and conformance checking, security and trust, change management.

Business Service Modelling: Methods and tools for capturing business goals and requirements, decomposition into business services, business processes, business policies, modeling, analysis, and simulation

Integrating Systems of Systems using Services: : Analysis and design techniques for integration architectures, architectures and design patterns for services and SOAs, federated authentication and authorization, data and service distribution, virtualization of storage and computation, policy management and governance in distributed SOAs, service-lifecycle management, service integration ontologies, change management, mobility of services.

Service Engineering: Service description, discovery, configuration, service mining, methods and tools for service development, governance, verification and validation, information elicitation about services, service advertisements, semantics-based service discovery, orchestration discovery, constraint specification and enforcement.

Service Assembly: Service development and discovery, service composition architectures, service and resource registries and associated metadata, standards and technologies for service invocation and notification, semantic matching, contracting and negotiation, deployment strategies for assemblies, strategies and architectures for service delivery and installation, deployment topologies and associated metadata, service versioning and update

Service Management: Instrumentation and service-related data aggregation, end-to-end measurement, analysis, modeling and capacity planning, definition of deployment topology, infrastructure configuration, problem determination for SOAs, ITIL processes, change management in live systems, service migration, service mobility.

SOA Runtime: Enterprise service bus for mediation, transformation and routing, runtime development and service registries, integration of legacy applications, SOA adaptation and runtime reconfiguration, information services for data access and data integration, scalability, topology and optimization, service-oriented middleware, policy based configuration and workload management.

Quality of Service: Reliable service-oriented computing, security and privacy in service-oriented computing, SLA and policy specification and enactment, QoS negotiation, autonomic management of service levels, empirical studies and benchmarking of QoS, performance and dependability prediction in SOA.

Service Applications (Grid, E-science, Government, etc.): Services and architectures for management of infrastructural resources, data- and compute-intensive applications, execution and resource allocation services for job scheduling, protocols for coordination across multiple resource managers, business-value based allocation, acquisition and dissemination of sensor and actuator information, prototype systems and toolkits.

Business and Economical Aspects of Services: business value estimation for services and service landscapes, in connection with service migration, disconnected operation of services, discovery of and access to mobile services, social aspects of service networks, innovative strategies for creation and management of virtual enterprises and organizations, exploitation models, pricing models.