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First Announcement and Call for Papers: Workshop On Open Distributed
Processing: Enterprise, Computation, Knowledge, Engineering and
Realisation (WOODPECKER'2001)
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 [Leaflet in
PDF] |
Technical Program (Version in PDF)
In conjunction with the Third International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ICEIS 2001
6 July 2001,
Setúbal – Portugal
Chair:
Haim
Kilov Haimk@acm.org
New
Jersey
USA
Program Committee:
Ken Baclawski (USA)
Xavier Blanc (France)
William Frank (USA)
Marie-Pierre Gervais (France)
Lea Kutvonen (Finland)
Juliette Le-Delliou (France)
P.F.Linington (UK)
Joaquin Miller (USA)
Ruben Prieto-Diaz (USA)
Kerry Raymond (Australia)
Sandy Tyndale-Biscoe (UK)
Kevin P. Tyson (USA)
Antonio Vallecillo (Spain)
Bryan Wood (UK)
Aim of the Workshop:
The goal of information systems is to support business processes and solve business problems. To do that, both the business and the information systems have to be appropriately understood by all stakeholders. This understanding is demonstrated in business, IT system and technological infrastructure specifications. There is a general misconception that these types of specification are substantially different. This leads to very serious problems -- particularly in cooperation, or lack thereof, between groups of people speaking very different and obscure languages. But these languages should be neither very different nor obscure: it is possible to put our specifications in order.
In the last 50 or so years it became possible to formulate the common concepts underlying various seemingly different areas of mathematics; similarly, in the last 30 or so years it became possible to formulate the common concepts underlying various seemingly different areas of information management. In both cases, the concepts have been around for a long time, but only recently they have become well-defined and successfully employed in applications.
The semantics of fundamental concepts and constructs of information management was clearly and explicitly defined in an international (ISO) standard -- the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). These definitions are neutral with respect to a methodology, technology, or tool(set). This made the following possible: - to provide clarity and understandability for all stakeholders who could use the same explicitly defined contracts instead of handwaving or slide shows; - to provide for traceability between and maintainability of specifications ( and of products and services that ought to satisfy these specifications) instead of relying on folklore or on tacit knowledge of gurus; - to define explicitly the relationships between software artefacts visible to the business and the appropriate fragments of business specifications; - to understand, before it’s too late, the damage to a business that implementation of a particular IT service or system will inflict, and correct it.
Abstraction and precision are the most important characteristics of a good specification. Only a precise specification can be validated by subject matter experts and satisfied by implementors. Only an abstract specification, i.e., a specification in which irrelevant details are suppressed, can be understood by humans. Since different details of a specification may be relevant for different people, viewpoints are used to provide for specifications focussed on specific concerns.
Areas of Interest: