The ability to negotiate contracts for a wide range of aspects and to provide services conforming to them is a most pressing need in service-oriented architectures. High-level models of contracts are making their way into service-oriented architectures, but application developers are still left to their own devices when it comes to writing code that will comply with a contract concluded just before service provisioning. At the programming language level, contracts appear as separate concerns that cut across application logic, while analysis requires that contracts are abstracted from applications to become amenable to formal reasoning using formal language techniques. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on language-based solutions to the above issues through formalization of contracts, design of appropriate abstraction mechanisms, and formal analysis of contract languages and software.

The workshop will consist mainly of a number of presentations by invited speakers. A small number of additional sessions will be reserved for other researchers in the field who are encouraged to submit a short abstract of their work as an expression of interest in participating in the workshop by 23 September 2008. The number of participants in the workshop is strictly limited.

FLACOS'08 is partially supported by the Nordunet3 project "Contract-Oriented Software Development for Internet Services" (COSoDIS).

Typical topics of the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Formal languages for contracts
• Contract-oriented software development
• Formal analysis of contracts, including static analysis, run-time verification, and model checking techniques
• Contract synthesis
• Contract transformation and contract refinement
• Contract negotiation, discovery and monitoring
  

Authors wishing to give a talk at the workshop are invited to submit an extended abstract of their work (3-8 pages, in PDF format, one column, printable on A4 paper) to flacos-08@cs.um.edu.mt by 23 September 2008. Submission of work submitted for formal publication elsewhere and work in progress is permitted.

The abstracts of the accepted contributions will be available at the workshop. After the workshop, selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming (Elsevier), following the standard reviewing process of the journal.

The call is also available as a text file format.

Paper Submission Deadline: 23 September 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 5 October 2008
Registration Deadline: 14 October 2008
FLACOS 2008 Workshop: 27-28 November 2008

Information about Malta, accomodation and airport transfers can be found at here.

• Emilia Cambronero Piqueras (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)
• Tomasz Janowski (UNU/IIST)
• Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College London, UK)
• Tom Maibaum (McMaster University, Canada) cancelled
• Fabio Massacci (Universitá di Trento, Italy)
• Ugo Montanari (Universita' di Pisa)
• Wolfgang Reisig (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlina)
• Isabelle Simplot-Ryl (University of Lille 1, France)
• Oleg Sokolsky (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Ketil Stølen (SINTEF ICT, Norway)

• Service Contracts in a Secure Middleware for Embedded Peer-to-Peer Systems, Antonio Brogi
• A Tool for the Design and Verification of Composite Web, Emilia Cambronero Piqueras
• Treaty - A Modular Component Contract Language, Jens Dietrich, Graham Jenson
• Increasing Trust in Public Service Delivery - Contract-Based Software Infrastructure for Electronic Government, Tomasz Janowski, Adegboyega Ojo
• Towards Verifying Contract Regulated Service Composition, Alessio Lomuscio
• Security-By-Contract for the Future Internet?, Fabio Massacci
• Cc-Pi: A Constraint-Based Language for Contracts with Service Level Agreements, Ugo Montanari
• Contract-Based Verification of Hierarchical Systems of Components, Sophie Quinton, Susanne Graf
• Service Oriented Architectures: The New Software Paradigm, Wolfgang Reisig
• Permission to Speak: An Access Control Logic, Oleg Sokolsky
• A Contract-Oriented View on Threat Modelling, Ketil Stølen
• Integrating Contract-based Security Monitors in the Software Development Life Cycle, Isabelle Simplot-Ryl
• An Aspect-Oriented Behavioral Interface Specification Language, Takuo Watanabe, Kiyoshi Yamada

Abstracts of the talks can be found at this page.

The full workshop programme can be found here.

• Björn Bjurling,, SICS, Sweden
• Olaf Owe, University of Oslo, Norway
• Gordon Pace, University of Malta, Malta
• Anders P. Ravn, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Gerardo Schneider, University of Oslo, Norway

• Gordon Pace, University of Malta, Malta
• Gerardo Schneider, University of Oslo, Norway

For any further information, you may contact us at flacos-08@cs.um.edu.mt