The wide spread of Internet technologies is having an important impact on the way businesses deal with their partners and customers. To remain competitive, traditional businesses are under pressure to take advantage of the information revolution the Internet and the Web have brought about. They are increasingly adopting Web-based solutions for more automation, efficient business processes, service personalization, and worldwide visibility.

The rapidly expanding Web services are one of the technologies that could help businesses be more Web-oriented. A Web service is an operation typically addressed via a URL, declaratively described using widely accepted standards, and accessed via platform-independent XML-based messages. The development of industry standards, products, and tools for supporting Web service system development is proceeding at a very rapid rate. Standards exist for service discovery (UDDI), description (WSDL), coordination (BPML, BPEL4WS, WSCI), and communication (SOAP). In parallel with the development of these general-purpose Web services, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has successfully executed efforts for GIS interoperability. For example, the OGC Web Services (OWS) initiative has undergone multiple phases including the Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS), Web Coverage Server (WCS), and OGC Web Service Architecture. For the GIS community, Web services are a suitable technology for providing and sharing the huge amount of data currently available thanks to satellites, sensors, etc. These services enable users to perform geo-processing tasks, such as spatial searches, mapping, and geo-coding.

Despite all the efforts that are spent on Web services research and development, many businesses, particularly GIS-oriented, are still struggling with how to put their core business competences on the Internet as a collection of Web services.  

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the recent and significant developments in the areas of Web Services and GISs and to provide a forum for articles that bring the challenges in the their combination, and the opportunity for all involved to debate new issues and directions for research and development work in the future.

Specific possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Geographic Web services
• Web services standards for GISs
• Geographical search engines and web services
• Development environment for GIS Web services
• Frameworks for building geographic Web services
• GIS Web service modelling, design, and architecture
• Web map services
• Geographic Web services personalization
• GIS Web applications
• Semantic web for GIS.
• Context Management for GIS Web services.
• Software Agent Architecture for GIS Web services.

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This workshop will be of interest to researchers and industrial community who are working in e-Business, as a primary application area of Web services. It is also of interest to those tracking and developing standards addressing GIS and Web services at the same time. Furthermore, the workshop is of a general interest to anyone using the software-agent and Web service paradigms for GIG-oriented software development. Finally, we believe that the Workshop's topic area will be of significant interest to the wider IT community and expect industry participation.

The workshop format will be designed to foster discussion and developing action outcomes on key issues relating to research relating to WS and GISs. We plan one or two invited presentations and panels discussing the current state of play of engineering and management of Web Services and GISs. The accepted presentations will be grouped into topic areas, with presentations followed by panels by the presenters to discuss specific questions and issues.

Authors are requested to submit full papers in pdf format, in English using the submission portal at http://www.easychair.org/WSGIS2007/ . The length of the paper is limited to up to 8 pages using 2 columns. For formatting, please refer to the information for authors by IEEE.

Workshop papers are equivalent to ICDIM 2007 full conference papers in all respects. Workshop papers will be fully indexed by IEEE Xplore.

All papers submitted to WSGIS'2007 must be previously unpublished and may not be considered for publication elsewhere at any time during WSGIS'2007 review period.

Papers describing research-in-progress may be submitted provided they include sufficient results to validate the research. The Program Committee will evaluate the papers based on scientific significance, relevance to the conference, novelty, relation to previously published literature, and clarity of presentation. Submission of a paper, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work.

Alex Alexandropoulos, American University in Dubai, UAE
Anne H.H. Ngu, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA
Andrew L. Wendelborn, University of Adelaide, Australia
Thierry Badard, University of Laval, Canada
Frederic Hubert, University of Laval, Canada
Pedro Jose Marron, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Evaggelia Pitoura, University of Ioannina, Greece
Aris M. Ouksel, University of Chicago, USA.
Sylvain Giroux, University of Sherbrooke, Canada
Elarbi Badidi, UAE University, UAE
Hazem Alkhatib, UAE University, UAE

Wathiq Mansoor (point of contact)
Address: American University in Dubai
Dubai, PO BOX 28282, UAE.
Email: wmansoor@aud.edu   

Nafaâ Jabeur
Address: Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, Windsor University
Memorial Hall Room 204, 401 Sunset Avenue, 
Windsor, Ontario, Canada, N9B 3P4
Email: jabeur@uwindsor.ca  

Zakaria Maamar
Address: College of Information Technology
Zayed University
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Email: zakaria.maamar@zu.ac.ae 

Michael Sheng
Address: School of Computer Science
The University of Adelaide
Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
Email: qsheng@cs.adelaide.edu.au

Said Elnaffar
College of Information Technology
United Arab Emirates University
P.O. Box 17555, Al-Ain
United Arab Emirates
Email: elnaffar@uaeu.ac.ae

Wathiq Mansoor is an associate professor at the American University in Dubai, U.A.E. His research interests lie in the areas of mobile computing, Web services, software agents, and wireless networks.

Nafaâ Jabeur is a postdoctoral fellow in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at Windsor University in Canada since September 2006. His research interests include sensor webs, wireless sensor networks, web and mobile map services, and multiagent systems.

Zakaria Maamar is an associate professor in the College of Information Technology at Zayed University in Dubai, U.A.E since 2000. His research interests lie in the areas of mobile computing, Web services, and software agents.

Michael Sheng is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research interests lie in the areas of Web services, business process integration, and pervasive computing.

Said Elnaffar is an Assistant Professor at the College of IT, UAE University (UAE). He received his Ph.D. from Queen's University (Canada). His research focuses on Applied AI, QoS in Web Services and Grid Computing, Systems Performance.