Report on the VLDB workshop on technologies for e-services (TES)

1 Aims and scope The Web is changing every aspect of our lives, but no area is undergoing as rapid and significant changes as the way businesses operate. Today, large and small companies are using the Web to communicate with their partners, to connect with their back-end systems, and to perform electronic commerce transactions. The next chapter of the Internet story is the evolution of today's e-business and e-commerce systems into "e-services", such as order procurement, on-line trading, customer relationship management, product promotion, or real-time car navigation and traffic information services. In order to make e-services available to customers, service providers need to address several issues, such as: • e-service description: which are the attributes of an e-service that should be made visible to customers or applications, and how they should be described. • e-service advertisement: how service providers can publish service description so that they can be discovered and accessed by customers and applications. • e-service discovery and selection: how customers and applications can discover and select the e-service (or the combination of e-services) that best fulfill their requirements. • e-service composition: how basic e-services (possibly offered by different companies) can be combined to form value-added, reliable services. Which architectures, models, and languages can achieve zero latency service integration and cross-organizational business process automation. • e-service delivery: how e-services are delivered to businesses and to customers • e-service monitoring and analysis: how service executions can be monitored and how service execution data can be analyzed in order to improve the service quality or efficiency • e-service contracts: how to agree on and perform legal contracts between service providers and clients electronically. • e-service ratings: how to validate service claims and evaluate the quality of the different service providers.