VORTE 2006
Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for the Enterprise

Vocabularies, ontologies and business rules are key components of a model-driven approach to enterprise computing in a networked economy. VORTE 2006 is the second workshop on an EDOC conference that intends to bring together researchers and practitioners in areas such as philosophical ontology, enterprise modeling, information systems, semantic web, MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) and business rules to discuss the role of foundational and domain ontologies in the conceptual development and implementation of next generation tools for enterprise computing.

Workshop Chairs

• Marcus Spies, University of Munich, Germany

• Giancarlo Guizzardi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ISTC-CNR), Italy

• Gerd Wagner, Brandeburg Univ. of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Web page

    http://www.pms.ifi.lmu.de/mitarbeiter/spies/EDOCVORTE2006.html

MWS 2006
Middleware for Web Services Workshop

Middleware plays an important role for Web services technologies. For example, implementation independence of Web services is achieved using middleware, such as application servers and/or SOAP engines. In addition, different middleware solutions are used to provide, monitor, and manage quality of service aspects, such as performance, security, and reliability. The goal of this workshop is to bring together industrial, academic, and government researchers and developers interested in Web services and/or middleware technologies. Through paper presentations and discussions, this workshop will contribute to the exchange of knowledge and ideas, dissemination of results about completed and on-going research projects, as well as identification and analysis of remaining open research issues. It is a follow up to the successful 2005 Middleware for Web Services (MWS 2005) workshop at EDOC 2005.

Workshop Chairs

• Aad van Moorsel, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
• Raymond Wong University of New South Wales, Australia
• Vladimir Tosic, Lakehead University, Canada

Web page

    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~mws2006

IWMEC 2006
Models for Enterprise Computing

Enhancing business performance in contemporary domains (e.g., e-commerce, and logistics) requires systems whose size and intricacy challenge most of the current software engineering methods and tools. Shifting intellectual property and business logic from source code into models allows organizations to focus on the essential aspects of their systems, which have traditionally been blurred by the usage of standard programming languages and underlying technologies. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) considers models as first-class entities enabling new possibilities for creating, analyzing, and manipulating systems through various types of tools and languages. Each model usually addresses one concern, and the transformations between models provide a chain that enables the automated implementation of a system initiating from its corresponding models.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share experiences in using modelling as a universal paradigm that assists crosscutting methodologies and techniques to interoperate in a more general setting. The workshop intends to address questions about the nature and features of those models and domain-specific metamodels required to capture and measure particular aspects of enterprise computing (e.g., performance, distribution, security, load-balancing, and dependability) and specific business/application domains. Emphasis will be devoted to modelling enterprise legacy systems for integration and evolution, definition of (interoperable) enterprise model repositories, specification of model operations (composition, merging, and difference), model transformation and megamodelling, and the definition of development methodologies that allow all of the benefits of modelling to be realized. This workshop focuses on the scientific and practical aspects related with the adoption of MDE for supporting enterprise system engineering and modelling.

Workshop Chairs

• Jean Bézivin, University of Nantes, France
• Jeffrey G. Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
• Alfonso Pierantonio,  Università degli Studi dell'Aquila, Italy

Web page

    http://www.model-transformation.org/IWMEC2006/

TEAR 2006
Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research

Enterprise architecture (EA) offers organizations a holistic approach to align information technology to their business goals. This is important because organizations need to adapt increasingly fast to changing customer requirements and business goals. This need influences the entire chain of activities of an enterprise, from business processes to IT support. Moreover, a change in one architecture may influence other architectures. For example, when a new product is introduced, someone should be made responsible for it, and business processes for production, sales and after-sales need to be adapted. It might be necessary to change applications, or even adapt the IT infrastructure. Each of these fields will have its own architectures. To keep the enterprise architecture coherent and aligned with the business goals of the enterprise, the relations between these different architectures must be clear, and a change should be carried through methodically in all architectures.

Until recently, practitioners, consulting firms and tool vendors have been leading in the development of the EA discipline. Research on enterprise architecture has been taking place in relatively isolated communities. The main objective of this workshop is to bring these different communities of EA researchers together and to identify trends and major research challenges in EA research. This workshop will provide a discussion forum where EA researchers and practitioners can meet and exchange experiences, problems and ideas related to EA.

Workshop Chairs

• Marc M. Lankhorst, Telematica Instituut, the Netherlands
• Maarten W.A. Steen, Telematica Instituut, the Netherlands

Web page

    http://tear2006.telin.nl

WODPEC 2006
Workshop on ODP for Enterprise Computing

The RM-ODP standard still provides the only comprehensive and coherent framework of concepts for the specification of complex large scale IT system, and has taken on a new significance in the light of the MDA (Model Driven Architecture). Thus, we are witnessing major companies and organizations looking at RM-ODP as a promising approach for structuring their large-scale distributed IT system specifications. In this context it is significant that the joint ISO/IEC and ITU-T project, launched in 2004, to define a standard for the use of UML for ODP system specifications (ITU-T Rec. X.906 | ISO/IEC 19793) is now coming to fruition.

With this increase in the significance of the RM-ODP comes the need to address a range of issues associated from the practical application of the concepts. For example, how to address in a specification certain requirements, such as business rules, non-functional aspects, or technology requirements. Other issues are related to the use of UML: what constraints and problems does the use of UML bring for ODP system specifications? Are there practical alternatives? Finally, there are issues concerning development approaches and processes, and current and emerging architectural approaches. Is the RM-ODP approach consistent with MDA and, if so, in what way? How can it accommodate architectural approaches such as the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Component-based Architecture (CBA), and the Event Driven Architecture (EDA)? Can it accommodate aspect-oriented development approaches? Can it be successfully integrated into development processes such as RUP?

Following the success of WODPEC 2004 and WODPEC 2005, WODPEC 2006 aims to continue to provide a discussion forum where researchers, practitioners, system modellers, tool developers and representatives of standardization bodies can meet and exchange experiences, problems and ideas related to the ODP framework for system specification, its practical application and long term evolution, and its use in conjunction with other architectural practices and approaches (e.g., MDA, SOA, CBA, EDA) in the realm of Enterprise Distributed Computing.

Workshop Chairs

• João Paulo A. Almeida,  Telematica Instituut (The Netherlands)
• Peter F. Linington,  University of Kent (UK)
• Akira Tanaka,  Hitachi (Japan)
• Bryan Wood,  Open-IT Ltd (UK)

Web page

    http://wodpec2006.telin.nl/

AQuSerM 2006
Advances in Quality of Service Management

Service Level Management (SLM) is the process of managing the Quality of Service (QoS) demanded by clients and offered by providers. In the past, SLM approaches have focused on service contract definition, monitoring and reporting and have typically been handled by enterprise system management tools such as Microsoft’s SMS, CA’s Unicenter and Empirix’s OneSight. However, traditional approaches are inadequate when dealing with complex service-oriented architectures. Service-oriented architectures are compositional, dynamic and often distributed over the internet. For such architectures, SLM becomes a difficult problem that can no longer be handled by traditional monitoring tools. This is because of the dynamic, flexible, compositional and global natures of SOAs.

This workshop will be concerned with the issues that are important to modern QoS management: the monitoring of widely distributed components, dynamic adaptation strategies and the necessity for more sophisticated prediction and diagnostic analysis techniques. Model-driven approaches to these issues will be a special focus of the workshop. The workshop shall bring together researchers from academia and industry interested in cutting edge formal and model-based approaches as well as utilizing current standards and middleware to meet the challenges of SLM for the 21st century.

Workshop Chairs

• Iman Poernomo, King’s College London, UK
• Guijun Wang, Boeing, US

Web page

    http://palab.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/aquserm/

EDM 2006
Electronic Document Management in an Enterprise Computing Environment

Enterprises have traditionally relied on paper filing systems for storage and retrieval of business documents such as essential letters, contracts, board resolutions, plans, checklists, policies and spreadsheets. However, paper records are extremely difficult to manage because they have to be stored in and retrieved from one and only one place. Electronic document management systems solve many of the storage and retrieval problems inherent in paper filing systems while simultaneously reducing business costs. An electronic document management system can manage electronic as well as paper-based documents. It usually consists of an optical scanner and OCR system to convert paper documents into an electronic form, a number of system modules to file, index, handle and process, convert and destruct documents, as well as document workflows execution, a database system to store and organize documents, a search engine to retrieve specific documents and a data extraction engine for data mining.

Recently, electronic document management solutions have been widely used in financial, insurance, medical, manufacturing and other industries. These paperless office solutions help enterprises manage large volumes of paper and electronic documents, execute document workflows, optimize other document related business processes, enforce privacy, improve efficiency, increased productivity, save valuable time, money and effort. Other benefits include easy accessibility, better version control, less floor space required by eliminating most filing cabinets, and environment friendly by minimizing the usage of paper.

The First International Workshop on Electronic Document Management in an Enterprise Computing Environment (EDM 2006) is the forum to discuss innovative ideas, the state of the art technologies and the future trends in electronic document management among researchers, scientists, professors and students, software architects and industry professionals.

Workshop Chairs

• Thomas Kwok, IBM Research Division, USA
• William Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Web page

    http://www.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~edoc06/workshop/edm.html

SISS 2006
Service Intelligence and Service Science

The global economy and enterprises are evolving to become service-oriented. To address the needs of growing service sector at the Age of Information and Communication, IBM proposed an emerging research and curriculum area called Service Science to the industry and academia that is based on anthropology, game theory and behavioral economics with technologies. Service Science is a combined discipline of operations research, management science, industrial and systems engineering, marketing, contracts and negotiations, and computer science. Beyond all these technical perspectives, Service Science also includes culture transformation and integration methods based on beliefs, assumptions, principles, and values between two enterprises.

Based on this context, there are recently more and more scientific research works on the services provision between requestors and providers. In particular, the application of artificial intelligence plays an important role in decision support in Service Science. Today the creation, operation, and evolution of artificial intelligence raise concerns that range from high-level requirements and policy modeling through to the deployment of specific implementation technologies and paradigms, and involve a wide (and ever growing) range of methods, tools, and technologies. They also cover a broad spectrum of vertical domains and industry segments, from electronic and mobile commerce to real-time applications for the extended enterprise, such as service activity planning and monitoring.

This workshop intentionally seeks scientists, educators, industry people, policy makers, decision makers, and others who have some insight and vision and understanding of the big challenges in Service Intelligence and Service Science.

Workshop Chairs

• Dickson K. W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong
• Ho-fung Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Web page

    http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~lhf/siss2006.htm

Contact Information

Please address any request for further information to the EDOC 2006 Workshop Chair, Antonio Vallecillo.