%O Proceedings of the 17th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2008, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2008, Budapest, Hungary, March 29-April 6, 2008 %S Lecture notes in computer science %D 2008 %R 10.1007/978-3-540-78739-6_21 %N 4960 %L eprints2296 %A Hugo Torres Vieira %A Luis Caires %A Jo?o C. Seco %B Programming Languages and Systems %X We present a process-calculus model for expressing and analyzing service-based systems. Our approach addresses central features of the service-oriented computational model such as distribution, process delegation, communication and context sensitiveness, and loose coupling. Distinguishing aspects of our model are the notion of conversation context, the adoption of a context sensitive, message-passing-based communication, and of a simple yet expressive mechanism for handling exceptional behavior. We instantiate our model by extending a fragment of the ?-calculus, illustrate its expressiveness by means of many examples, and study its basic behavioral theory; in particular, we establish that bisimilarity is a congruence %I Springer %P 269-283 %T The conversation calculus: a model of service-oriented computation