Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Service oriented computing

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing - ICSOC'04. This year's conference, building on the success of the First International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing held in Trento in December 2003, is becoming a well-established and widely recognized event. This is demonstrated not only by the high number of submissions, but also by the quality of the accepted papers that you will find in this volume. The 2nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing is held in New York in November, 2004. We are sure that the skylines of New York will impress all visitors of this vibrant and exciting city. We do hope that this year attendees will take the chance to enjoy a city that offers entertainments for all tastes. New York is also a city home to many important laboratories and software industries, such as IBM Research Labs, members of which this year have took the burden of organizing the conference. It is here that most of the standards that form the basis of the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm were conceived and designed and it is therefore a great pleasure to have the second edition of ICSOC held in New York. Service-Oriented Computing is rapidly establishing itself as the paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing. SOC utilizes services as the constructs to support the development of rapid, low-cost and easy composition of distributed applications. Services are self-contained processes - deployed over standard middleware platforms - that can be discovered, composed and invoked through all kinds of networks. On the research side, fundamental topics in SOC, such as service composition, delivery, discovery, description and integration are covered in this volume together with issues of service design and modeling, reasoning and monitoring, and service architectures. But also timely topics such as service security, quality of service models are investigated. A section on theoretical frameworks also delineates fundamental aspects of services. The implementation of the SOC paradigm is becoming more and more feasible. The quality of the industrial papers received this year testifies this trend. The industrial papers ranked among the best of the whole conference and it was an easy decision that of moving them to the main proceedings volume. This is a clear sign of the taking off of SOC in industry.