A new paradigm – service-orientation – is currently emerging for distributed computing and e-business processing; it has evolved from object-oriented and component-based computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. This new paradigm utilizes services (autonomous platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered and accessed over the Internet using standard protocols) as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions; services will be important for customers and not the specific software or hardware component that is used to implement the services. In this context, services become the next level of abstraction in the process of creating systems that would enable automation of e-businesses. This paradigm shift is changing the way the computer software is developed and used (designed, architected, delivered, consumed, and analysed), and this way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services is usually referred to as Service-oriented Architectures (SOA).

In recent years, various forms of service-oriented architectures have appeared; amongst them, Web services, Grid services, Semantic Web Services, and e-Services are the most important. Although they share some of the principles of service-oriented architectures, they differ in many other aspects, which is an undesirable situation in the context of service-oriented architectures. Since standard protocols are a basic principle of SOA, this undesirable situation is partly due also to the fact that there are currently no mature methodologies and techniques to support analysis for service-oriented architectures. Moreover, all these forms of service-oriented architectures have developed different conceptual models, resulting in different methodologies for modelling and designing service-oriented architectures.

In this context, this workshop aims to tackle the research problems (as well as practical experiences) around methods, concepts, models, languages and technology that enable computing in service-oriented environments. Of particular interest are the architectural, technical, and developmental foundations of service-oriented architectures, and showing how they combine synergistically to enable distributed computing on the scale required by today’s Internet-connected enterprise.

The focus of the workshop is broader than, but includes, the OMG MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach for service oriented architectures. MDA was for the first international workshop, mda4soa’06, used as short for Modeling, Design and Analysis.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry practitioners (e.g. leading modelers, architects, system vendors, open-source projects, developers, and end-users) addressing many of these issues (including recent developments in tools and techniques, and real-world implementations of service-oriented distributed applications), and promote and foster a greater understanding of how service-oriented architectures can assist business to business and enterprise application integration, thus helping people develop and manage business processes more efficiently and effectively.