Abstract

This special issue includes revised versions of selected papers that were presented at the Special Track on Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming (SOAP) of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2014)1. SOAP 2014 was held in Gyeongju, Korea, in March 24-28, 2014. Its proceedings were published in a volume edited by Yookun Cho, Sung Y. Shin, Sang-Wook Kim, Chih-Cheng Hung and Jiman Hong and published by ACM in 2014. This special issue was motivated by the quality of the works presented at the conference and by the increasing proliferation of service-oriented systems in our society such as e-governance, e-health and e-commerce systems. We believe that the contributions in this volume provide a valuable example of current research in this area. We also believe that the published works will contribute to the main aims of the SOAP track, that is to transform Service-Oriented Programming (SOP) into a mature discipline with both solid scientific foundations and mature software engineering development methodologies supported by dedicated tools.