Technologies for E-services

E-services, and in particular Web services, are emerging as a promising tech- logy for the e? ective automation of application integration across networks and organizations. The basic technological infrastructure for e-services is structured around three major standards: SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. These standards p- vide building blocks for service description, discovery, and interaction. E-service technologies have clearly in? uenced positively the development of integrated - stems by providing programmatic access to e-services through SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. E-services are evolving toward being able to solve critical integ- tion issues including security, transactions, collaborative processes management, semantic aspects, and seamless integration with existing middleware infrastr- tures. VLDB-TES 2003 was the fourth workshop in a successful series of annual workshops on technologies for E-services, held in conjunction with the VLDB conference. The objective of VLDB-TES 2003 was to bring together researchers, practitioners, anduserstoexchangenewideas, developments, andexperienceson issues related to E-services. VLDB-TES 2003 took place in Berlin, Germany. It featured the presentation of 16 regular papers. In addition to the presentation of research papers, the workshop included two invited talks and a panel discussion.