CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

            Second Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of
                Contract-Oriented Software  (FLACOS'08)

                    Malta, 27-28 November, 2008
                   http://www.ifi.uio.no/flacos08


NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE: SEE BELOW

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.


IMPORTANT DATES

     Paper Submission Deadline:     (extended) September 23, 2008
     Notification of Acceptance:      October 5, 2008
     Registration Closes:                  October 14, 2008
     WORKSHOP:                        November 27-28, 2008


SCOPE

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


CONFIRMED INVITED PARTICIPANTS

    * Emilia Cambronero Piqueras (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)
    * Tomasz Janowski (UNU/IIST)
    * Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College London, UK) 
    * Tom Maibaum (McMaster University, Canada)
    * Fabio Massacci (Universitái Trento, Italy)
    * Ugo Montanari (Universitài Pisa, Italy)
    * Wolfgang Reisig (Humboldt-Universitäzu Berlina, Germany)
    * Isabelle Simplot-Ryl (University of Lille 1, France)
    * Oleg Sokolsky (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
    * Ketil Stolen (SINTEF ICT, Norway) 
    * More to be announced


SUBMISSIONS

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.


REGISTRATION INFORMATION

    * More information to follow.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

    * Bjorn Bjurling, SICS, Sweden
    * Olaf Owe, University of Oslo, Norway
    * Gordon Pace, University of Malta, Malta (co-chair)
    * Anders P. Ravn, Aalborg University, Denmark
    * Gerardo Schneider, University of Oslo, Norway (co-chair)


CONTACT INFORMATION

    * flacos-08@cs.um.edu.mt