Special sessions are very small and specialized events to be held during the conference as a set of oral presentations that are highly specialized in some particular theme or consisting of the works of some particular international project. A special session chair has to make sure that papers accepted to the special session have gone through a process of double-blind reviewing.

Conference reviewers may be available to collaborate in this process, upon request from the special session chair.

The goal of special sessions (minimum 4 papers; maximum 9) is to provide a focused discussion on innovative topics. Each prospective organizer is invited to submit a proposal explaining the targeted topic’s novelty/importance and listing the contributing authors and their contributions.

Please click here to see the guidelines for submitting a special session proposal

Special Session 1 & 2 joined - Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems

Chairs:
Aurora Vizcaíno, Escuela Superior de Informática Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (email)
Juan Pablo Soto, Escuela Superior de Informática Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (email)
Ezendu Ariwa, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom (email)

Scope:
In the last decades, knowledge management has captured enterprises’ attention as one of the most promising ways to reach success in this information era. A shorter life-cycle of products, globalization, and strategic alliances between companies demand a deeper and more systematic organizational knowledge management. Consequently, one way to assess an organization’s performance is to determine how well it manages its critical knowledge. In order to assist organizations to manage their knowledge, systems have been designed. These are called Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). However, developing KMS is a difficult task; since before developing this kind of system it is advisable to study and understand how the transfer of knowledge is carried out by people in real life. However, when developing KMS developers often focus on the technology without taking into account the fundamental knowledge problems that KMS are likely to support. In this session topics related to how to improve the performance of a company by using knowledge management techniques and systems will be dealted with.

On the other hand, in this special session the contributions will be mainly focused on hot topics such as:
- A methodology to develop Knowledge Management Systems
- Avoiding drawbacks of Knowledge Management System by using Intelligent Agents.
- Evaluating Knowledge Management Systems.

Special Session 2 - Joined with Special Session 1

Special Session 3 - Computer Supported Collaborative Editing

Chairs:
Claudia Ignat, LORIA-INRIA Lorraine, France (email)
Pascal Molli, LORIA- INRIA Lorraine, University Henri Poincaré, France (email)
Hala Skaf-Molli, LORIA- INRIA Lorraine, University Henri Poincaré, France (email)

Scope:
Computer-supported collaboration is becoming increasingly common, often compulsory in academia and industry where people work in teams and are distributed across space and time. The recent tendency manifested by the Web is to become a global read-write information space where multiple authors interact for editing web pages, in contrast to the initial adopted model of one author publishing to many readers. In spite of the increasing need for collaboration, it is surprising to see how poorly existing commercial systems support group activities. Very often, people send the shared documents by email and work sequentially to avoid conflicting updates. The existing popular alternatives to the email approach are the Wiki systems or version control systems such as CVS or Subversion. In these systems, users work in parallel, but when concurrent modifications are conflicting, generally one of the modifications is kept while others are ignored. These kinds of lost updates constitute a serious bottleneck for productive work since people cannot work safely in parallel. Recently, web-based collaborative tools for editing documents and spreadsheets developed by major software vendors such as Google (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) attracted the interest of a large number of users. However, these tools currently offer only real-time collaboration with a limited support for group awareness.
Collaborative editing field of research investigates how groups of people could be supported for editing a set of documents collaboratively over a computer network. Users can collaborate on real-time or work offline with the possibility to synchronize their changes at a later time. The major benefits of collaborative editing include reduced task completion time and distributed collaboration. On the other hand, the challenges that it raises are many, ranging from the technical challenges of maintaining consistency to the social challenges of supporting group activities and conventions across many different communities.
Technical issues in collaborative editing include syntactic and semantic consistency maintenance of shared data, undoing of operations performed by members of the group during the editing process, control of access to shared data and modelling the editing process by means of workflows techniques. Social issues include coordination and communication between the members of the group as well as workspace awareness that improve the group effectiveness. Most of these issues are studied in other research areas such as database systems, distributed systems and human computer interaction and discussions with specialists in these fields could improve research in collaborative editing.
The special session on collaborative editing is of general interest for the audience of ICEIS 2007 as most of the participants come from academia or industry and are interested in improving the effectiveness of team work. Examples of team activities involving collaborative editing include writing research papers, editing web pages, coding programs or creating product or architectural design. We anticipate that a particular interest for collaborative editing would be in E-learning as collaborative editing tools could be used in the teaching/learning process and also in software engineering for supporting the collaborative writing process of technical documents. Some of the technical solutions adopted in collaborative editing could be also adopted by other areas of research such as distributed systems.
As collaborative editing addresses issues covered by various research domains, the multidisciplinary ICEIS 2007 conference is a very suitable event to host a collaborative editing session presenting the most significant innovations in this area.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Consistency maintenance of replicated data
- Semantic consistency and conflict management in collaborative editing
- Group undo
- Access control for collaborative editing applications
- Workflow techniques for editing process
- Architectures of group editors
- Social issues of collaborative editing
- Awareness in collaborative editing
- User studies of group editors
- Applications of group editors in E-learning or software engineering
- Web-based collaborative editing technologies
- Requirements for collaborative editing in various application domains

Submission of papers
Authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above. As accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of ICEIS 2007 conference, the format of the paper should conform to the conference template and the length of the paper should be limited to 8 pages. We require that at least one author of each paper participates at the conference to present the paper. Authors should use the ICEIS submission website to submit their papers.

Special Session 4 - Applications in a Real World

Chair:
Wita Wojtkowski, Boise State University, USA (email)

Scope:
The purpose of the 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, as stated on its web site is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners who are engaged in bringing about advances and business applications of information systems. Thus, the focus of the Conference is on the real world applications. Proposed session does just that: we will ponder in a broad context, many topics. The unifying theme of the session concerns local conditions.

We start with the discussion of the technical and usability problems of the long-term digital archiving of documents that are to be preserved in various forms, for historical reasons, from radio broadcast, films, videos, manuscripts, in a language different from English, namely, Hungarian. This type of archive is to be used to inform the rural population of the country about its recent history, especially, the events of 1956.

We follow with the debate on the development of the intelligent tutoring systems to be made use of for distance education the in the country undergoing rapid economic development, Latvia.

Developing economies, such as that of Latvia, and other countries in the region, are concerned with informing themselves about the current best practice in business applications. That is why the second part of this session we ponder business process flexibility at different levels of abstraction, creating IT master plan and its implications for local systems development, and organizational forms of agile enterprise for the developing economies.

Special Session 5 - Electronic Institutions and Technologies for e-business - CANCELED

Chair:
Ana Paula Rocha, LIACC – Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal (email)
Henrique Cardoso, LIACC – Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal (email)
Eugénio Oliveira, LIACC – Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal (email)

Scope:
A major application area of MAS technology is e-business automation, including the establishment and operation of business relationships, namely in B2B activity. The Electronic Institution (EI) can be seen as a normative MAS, that provides a regulated and trustable environment, by enforcing norms of behaviour. An EI is a framework that enables, through a communication network, automatic transactions between parties, according to sets of explicit institutional norms and rules. It can then ensure the trust and confidence needed in any electronic transaction.
One of the key factors towards the adoption of agent-based approaches in real-world business scenarios is trust. When attempting to automate the creation and operation of business relationships, the behaviour of agents must be made predictable, by creating a regulated environment that enforces agents’ commitments.
Inter-operability is another important issue that should be addressed in automatic business transactions. Business parties should understand each other, despite the particular ontology each one has. The EI can help in this, by providing appropriate ontology services in order to help mutual understanding.
This special session intends to provide a specialized discussion where challenges in formalized and trustable e-business environments can be debated.

Topics:
- Intelligent Agents
- Intelligent Social Agents and DAI Applications
- B2B Electronic Commerce
- Virtual Enterprise
- Electronic Institution
- Ontologies
- Inter-Organizational business process management

Submission of papers:
Authors are invited to submit papers before *17^th January 2007*, in any of the topics listed above. As accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of ICEIS 2007 conference, the format of the paper should conform to the conference template and the length of the paper should be limited to 8 pages. We require that at least one author of each paper participates at the conference to present the paper. Authors should use the ICEIS submission website to submit their papers.

Special Session 6 - New Information System and Approaches for Product Maintenance

Chair:
Stéphanie Minel, LIPSI-ESTIA Biarritz, LAPS-Bordeaux University, France (email)
Jérémy Legardeur, LIPSI-ESTIA Biarritz, LAPS-Bordeaux University, France (email)

Scope:
The objective of manufacturing companies is to be able to produce innovative products for their market. However, in order to reduce the life cycle costs, the maintenance process and the customer services gradually become more useful and strategic for the companies. The main topic of this special session is to focus on the information systems and new approaches that foster innovations in the maintenance domain.

This special session aims to gather different works dedicated to develop:
- new flexible business processes with different operating modes for maintenance
- the global and worldwide integration of technological issues such as distributed databases, remote troubleshooting tools, smart and wireless tracking sensors, planning and logistic traceability and simulation.
- innovative method of change to manage new practices in the customized support and logistics services for the worldwide industry.

Topics of interest include:
- Organisational Issues on Systems Integration for Maintenance
- Distributed Database Applications for Maintenance
- Database Security and Transaction Support for Maintenance
- Mobile Databases and troubleshooting
- Datamining and Case-Based Reasoning Systems for Maintenance
- Knowledge Management
- Business Processes Re-engineering
- Logistics Traceability and Supply Chain Improvement
- RFID, Wireless and Mobile System for Maintenance
- Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for Maintenance

Special Session 7 - Comparative Evaluation of Semantic Web Service Frameworks

Chair:
Tiziana Margaria, Institute for Computer Science, University Potsdam, Germany (email)
Ulrich Küster, Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany (email)

Scope:
Service-Oriented Computing is one of the most promising software engineering trends for future distributed systems. Pushed by major industry players and supported by many standardization efforts, Web services are a prominent implementation of the service-oriented paradigm. They promise to foster reuse and to ease the implementation of loosely coupled distributed applications.

Though Web services are appealing especially in the area of enterprise application integration, the idea of service oriented computing and the envisioned availability of thousands of services can not be fully leveraged as long as service oriented applications must be created and maintained manually. Semantic technology may help here, by lifting service oriented applications to a new level of adaptability and robustness. By using semantic annotations to describe services and resources, the tasks of service discovery, selection, negotiation, and binding could be automated.

Currently there are many different approaches to semantic Web service descriptions and many frameworks built around them, yet a common understanding, evaluation scheme, and testbed to compare and classify these frameworks in terms of their abilities and shortcomings is still missing.

The SWS Challenge
The goal of the ongoing Semantic Web Service Challenge (www.sws-challenge.org) is precisely to develop this common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. This explores trade-offs among existing approaches, reveals the strengths and weaknesses  of the proposed approaches as well as which aspects of the problem space are not yet covered.

The series of three workshop so far has provided a forum for discussion based on a common application. The SWS Challenge focuses on the use of semantic annotations: participants are provided with semantics in the form of natural language text that they can formalize and use in their technologies. Being a challenge rather than a contest, workshop participants mutually evaluate and learn from each others' approaches.

The challenge has participating groups from industry and acadfemia developing software components and/or intelligent agents able to automate mediation, choreography and discovery processes between Web services.
It has presented two sets of problem scenarios from a B2B application domain (with increasing degrees of complexity) as common application to all the participating groups. This way the trade-offs among existing approaches that facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for services using semantic annotations can be explored.

• The mediation scenario problems concern making a legacy order management system interoperable with external systems that use a simplied version of the RosettaNet PIP3A4 specications.

• The discovery scenario problems concern the dynamical discovery, selection, binding, and invocation of the most appropriate shipment service for a set of given shipment requests.

At the SWS workshops the approaches were presented and demonstrated, but also the code was jointly reviewed. The common application helped developing a profound mutual understanding of each other's technology and the collaborative discussion of the profiles of the various approaches. The participants developed an evaluation scheme that classifies the functionality and the agility offered by the various approaches, and applied it to the participating technologies. Meanwhile there is a good variety of approaches, a good level of maturity of the proposed solutions, and a good understanding of the profiles of the methods.

The Session
This special session will present in a coherent way the results achieved so far. It will contain an introduction to the problem, to the Challenge methodology developed during the workshops and report on the experience gained so far. Papers in the session will focus primarily on presenting the results of the collaborative comparison of different approaches. Thus the session will not only provide an overview over existing approaches via their application to a common problem set, but also a unique qualitative comparison of these approaches. Beside presenting the results of the SWS-Challenge the session seeks papers describing other approaches to the evaluation of semantic web service frameworks. Such submissions should explain the approach taken, point out how a bias towards a specific technology has been avoided and describe the experiences, results and lessons learned.

Topics of interest include:
- Semantic Web Technologies
- Middleware Integration
- Legacy Systems
- Software Engineering
- Intelligent Agents
- Systems Engineering Methodologies
- Modelling Formalisms/Languages/Notations
- B2B and B2C Applications