Grid Services Engineering and Management: First International Conference, Gsem 2004, Erfurt, Germany

This volume consists of the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Grid Services Engineering and Management (GSEM 2004)that washeld in c- junction with the 5th International Conference Net.ObjectDays 2004 (NODE 2004) and the European Conference on Web Services 2004 (ECOWS 2004) in Erfurt, Germany on 27-30 September 2004. The Grid has emerged as a global platform to support on-demand virtual organizations for coordinated sharing of distributed data, applications and p- cesses. Service orientation of the Grid also makes it a promising platform for seamlessanddynamicdevelopment, integrationanddeploymentofservice-ori- ted applications. The application components can be discovered, composed and delivered within a Grid of services, which are loosely coupled to create dynamic business processes and agile applications spanning organizations and comp- ing platforms. The technologies contributing to such grids of services include Web services, the semantic Web, grid computing, component softwareand agent technologies. The GSEM 2004 conference provided an international forum for presenting thelatesttheoreticalandpracticalresultsintechnologysolutionsforengineering and management of Grid services and service-oriented applications. The conf- ence aimed at bringing together researchersand practitioners from diverse elds and interests, including Web services, the semantic Web, Grid infrastructures, software components, work?ows, agent technologies and service management, and those looking for new business and research cooperation opportunities in the area of Grid services and service-oriented applications.