Services-oriented computing (SoC) is an emerging computing paradigm for distributed systems that advocates Web-based interfaces for the distributed business processes of any enterprise. The interfaces, called Web services (WS), hold the promise for diluting the traditional challenges of interoperability, inflexibility, and performance that have long plagued the traditional distributed systems. Historically, research in distributed systems has shied away from adopting relevant AI methodologies; they have been generally perceived as esoteric and computationally-intensive. However, SoC research represents a significant departure from this line of thought, and presents a singular opportunity for AI techniques to enter and pervade this emerging area. From the AI researcher's perspective, SoC represents an emerging application testbed with its own distinct challenges and the potential to significantly impact both the industry and academia.

The goal of the workshop is to investigate the applicability of AI methodologies such as logic, theorem proving, search, planning, and probabilistic models to problems in SoC. In particular, AI techniques seem especially suited to address the problems of WS description, discovery, binding, WS process composition and execution, semantics for WS, and related issues. They complement and supplement the existing approaches by bringing the much required mathematical rigor and formal analysis to the area.