Liang-Jie Zhang 
Web Services 
European Conference, ECOWS 2004, Erfurt, Germany, September 27-30, 2004, Proceedings

Welcometotheproceedingsofthe2004European Conferenceon Web Services(ECOWS 2004).ECOWSisoneoftheleadinginternationalconferencesfocusingon Webservices. ECOWS2004wasaforumforresearchersandpractitionersfromacademiaandindustry to exchange information regarding advances in the state of the art and practice of Web services, identify emerging research topics, and de?ne the future directions of Web services computing. ECOWS 2004 had a special interest in papers that contribute to the convergence of Web services, Grid computing, e-business and autonomic computing, and papers that apply techniques from one area to another. This conference was called the International Conference on Web Services Europe in 2003. ECOWS 2004 was a sister event of the International Conference on Web Services 2004 (ICWS 2004), which attracted more than 250 registered participants in San Diego, USA. Web services are characterized by network-based application components and a service-oriented architecture using standard interface description languages and u- form communicationprotocols. Industrial applicationdomainsfor Webservicesinclude business-to-business integration, business process integration and management, c- tent management, e-sourcing, composite Web services creation, design collaboration for computer engineering, multimedia communication, digital TV, and interactive Web solutions. Recently, Grid computing has also started to leverage Web services to de?ne standard interfaces for business Grid services and generic reusable Grid resources. The program of ECOWS 2004 featured a variety of papers on topics ranging from Web services and dynamic business process composition to Web services and process management, Web services discovery, Web services security, Web services-based app- cations for e-commerce, Web services-based Grid computing, and Web services solu- ons.