Web services

After some time of early experience Web Services are moving themselves from a new highly fragmented technology to a piece of nowadays infrastructures which promise to address various current challenges. These include especially classical issues of integration and data in a heterogeneous environment. The Web Service technology provides an open and technology-agnostic interface, and furthermore propels new usage paradigms in distributed computing infrastructures like Grid Services. Successful adoption of Web Service technology relies on the de? nition of interoperable architectural building blocks which can be integrated in existing softwarearchitectures, likeJ2EEorCORBAheritage. Interoperabilitywillsurely proveitselfasthecriticalsuccessfactoroftheWebServiceproliferation. Inorder to accomplish these interoperability various standardization bodies such as the W3C, UN or OASIS founded activities to create speci? cations and products implementing these building blocks. As the sister event of the First International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2003), which was held in Las Vegas, June 23 - 26, USA, has proven to be an excellent catalyst for research and collaboration, the 2003 International C- ference on Web Services - Europe (ICWS-Europe 2003) is expected to continue this trend. The topics of papers collected in this proceedings volume ranges from issues like modeling, development, deployment, publishing, as well as discovery, composition and collaboration, plus monitoring and analytical control. Addit- nal contributions summarize some research and development challenges of bu- ding Web Service solutions. Especially, some contributions present an emerging research direction, namely, Web Services collaboration. Moreover, some major research activities associated with facilitating extended business collaboration using Web services and semantic annotation are also covered.