Submission of abstract: September 25, 2003 (closed)
Submission of Papers: October 2, 2003
Notification of Acceptance: November 14, 2003
Camera-Ready Copy: December 4, 2003

The need for increasing programming productivity and rapid development of complex systems provide the pragmatic motivation for the development of coordination/orchestration languages and models. The intellectual excitement associated with such endeavours is rooted in the decades-old desire to leverage off increasingly higher levels of abstractions. Coordination-based methods provide a clean separation between individual software components and their interactions within their overall software organisation. Coordination is relevant in design, development, debugging, maintenance, and reuse of all complex concurrent and distributed systems. Specifically, coordination becomes paramount in the context of open systems, systems with mobile entities, and dynamically re-configurable evolving systems. Moreover, coordination models and languages focus on such key issues in Component Based Software Engineering as specification, interaction, and dynamic compositions.

More recently, market trends brought on by the commercialisation of the World Wide Web, have fuelled a new level of interest in coordination-based approaches in industry. Applications like BizTalk, standards like the web services' WS-* family, and contending coordination standards like BEPL4WS and WSCI, are all examples of this phenomenon. This interest is opening up new opportunities both to apply coordination-based techniques to a broad class of applications as well as to grapple with potentially new kinds of requirements coming from internet-scale scenarios.

The previous conferences in this series took place in Cesena (Italy), Berlin (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Limasol (Cyprus), York (England). Building on the success of these events, this conference provides a forum for the growing community of researchers interested in models, languages, and implementation techniques for coordination and component-based software, as well as applications that utilise them. At http://music.dsi.unifi.it/coordination/ more details are available.

* Theoretical models and foundations for coordination
* Coordination middlewares
* Specification, refinement, and analysis of software architectures
* Architectural, and interface definition languages
* Agent-oriented languages and models
* Dynamic software architectures
* Component Programming
* Web Services
* Coordination in Peer to Peer and Grid Computing
* Tools and environments for the development of coordinated applications
* Industrial relevance of coordination and software architectures
* Domain-specific software coordination models and case studies.

The conference proceedings will be published by Springer, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The proceedings of the previous editions are appeared in the LNCS series: volumes 1061, 1282 and 1594, 1906, 2315.

(see also http://music.dsi.unifi.it/coordination).
Authors are invited to submit electronically a plain ASCII cover page containing the paper title, authors' names, contact author and full address (including e-mail and fax) together with an abstract of up to 100 words (no later than 25 September 2003). Full papers (in English, up to 15 pages) should be submitted in PostScript or PDF no later than 2 October 2003. This is a firm deadline. Authors are invited to use the llncs style. A link will be found the conference web page. Simultaneous submission to other conferences with proceedings or journals is not allowed.