Call for Papers Special Issue of the International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR) On Web Services Discovery and Composition Systems Submission Deadline: November 30, 2005 Using service-oriented computing approaches (i.e. web services), the capabilities of organizations can be openly exposed, easily searched and discovered, and made readily-accessible to humans and particularly to machines. Artificial intelligence and software engineering researchers alike are intrigued by the promise of ubiquitously discovering and incorporating services into their own business processes (i.e. composition and orchestration). With growing acceptance of service-oriented computing, an emerging area of research is the investigation of technologies that will enable the discovery and composition of web services. This proposed special issue solicits high-quality papers on software components and/or intelligent agents that can discover pertinent web services and compose them to create higher-level functionality. For this special issue, all the submitted manuscripts will undergo a rigorous peer-reviewing process and the selection criteria include both the system design's elegancy as well as its practicability. Each manuscript should include the evaluation section on the effectiveness of the proposed approach based on a given Web services repository. Repositories and example software are available at http://ws-challenge.georgetown.edu/ . Alternatively, authors may submit the repository used in their evaluation. This will provide a uniform section in each paper that will allow readers to understand the benefits and limitations of the variety of approaches that were implemented. The readers of this special issue will get an understanding of the benefits and limitations of various approaches for composing web services using Web Service Description Language (WSDL) files. Paper submissions should be full research papers, typically between 17-27 journal pages. Important Dates: November 30, 2005 -- Full Paper Submission Due December 30, 2005 -- Paper Acceptance Notice Sent to Authors Guest Editors: M. Brian Blake, Ph.D. Department of Computer Science Georgetown University E-mail: blakeb@cs.georgetown.edu William K. Cheung, Ph.D. Department of Computer Science Hong Kong Baptist University E-mail:william@comp.hkbu.edu.hk Kwok Ching Tsui, Ph.D. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) E-mail: kwokchingtsui@hsbc.com.hk Andreas Wombacher, Ph.D. Information Systems Group Department of Computer Science University of Twente E-mail: a.wombacher@utwente.nl All submissions must be original. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to: M. Brian Blake (blakeb@cs.georgetown.edu) or William Cheung (william@comp.hkbu.edu.hk) ------------------------- Michael Fitzgerald Nowlan Research Assistant Department of Computer Science Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057 mfn3@georgetown.edu