The 1st International Workshop on Advanced Enterprise Repositories (AER 2009)

6-7 May, 2009 - Milan, Italy

In conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2009)

Co-chairs
Aurona Gerber
Knowledge Systems Group, Meraka Institute
South Africa
Email

Knut Hinkelmann
University of Applied Sciences Northwestern
Switzerland
Email

Paula Kotzé
Human Factors and Enterprise Engineering Group, Meraka Institute
South Africa
Email

Ulrich Reimer
Institute for Information and Process Management
University of Applied Sciences St. Gallen
Switzerland
Email

Alta Van der Merwe
School of Computing, University of South Africa
South Africa
Email

Background and Goals
An organisation’s long-term success heavily depends on the proper management of its business processes. Business process management continuously monitors and improves processes e.g. in terms of cost, quality and duration time. To better support and improve business process management, process repositories are needed that make comprehensive information on processes available and offer elaborate query answering capabilities. Since business processes are intertwined with all the other aspects of an enterprise the process descriptions need to be integrated with the different views and perspectives of an enterprise architecture, including the business motivation, the IT and data perspectives, the organisational units and the business rules: The process repository thus becomes an enterprise repository.

Currently, the information in a process repository – if one exists at all – is mostly of an informal nature and mainly provides text descriptions and graphics depicting process models. As a consequence, the query answering capabilities of such a repository are quite limited and it can therefore be very cumbersome to find the needed information. Moreover, as only basic information on business processes is modelled, more advanced and business-crucial questions cannot be answered, for example questions about process variability, about reference processes and how actual processes refer to them, or about the design rationales for process implementations.

A prominent means to develop more advanced process, resp. enterprise repositories are more expressive representation languages making process information formally explicit and machine understandable. Semantic Web technology aiming at content-oriented ways of querying the Web is an approach that could be applied to enterprise repositories as well. Enriching process descriptions with metadata that is rooted in an underlying ontology would be a first step. Querying can be even further improved by extending the ontology with background knowledge and using reasoning mechanisms to deduce answers to a query which could otherwise not be found.

The workshop has the aim to exchange and discuss approaches to advanced process repositories and their extensions into more comprehensive enterprise repositories to give enterprises new and more advanced possibilities of making use of their process knowledge.

Topics of Interest
We are inviting papers that fall within the scope of the workshop as described above. We are especially interested in papers that address one or more of the following topics:

• Architectures and design principles for process repositories.
• Advanced representation languages for covering all kinds of process-related information stored in a process repository, such as
  
  - models for knowledge intensive processes,
  - reference models and their instantiations into specific processes,
  - design rationales for implementing processes,
  - modelling business rules and their relation to business processes,
  - dependencies between and constraints on processes,
  - information needed and produced within processes,
  - background knowledge needed for carrying out knowledge-intensive tasks,
  - descriptions of desired and actual process performance (e.g. cost, quality, duration time),
  - integrated models linking business processes with other perspectives (e.g. data, application systems, services, organisation structure, strategy, business motivation).

• Process ontologies for process repositories, allowing analysis, comparison and retrieval of process related information.
• Automatic analysis of business process descriptions and their transfer into a structure conforming to a given process ontology.
• Query languages for process repositories, including query evaluation and reasoning.
• Approaches to representing and querying the mapping between a business view of a process and its actual implementation on top of IT systems.
• Business cases and application scenarios for advanced process repositories.

Important Dates
Regular Paper Submission: deadline expired
Authors Notification: deadline expired
Final Paper Submission and Registration: deadline expired

Workshop Program Committee
Antonia Albani, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Joseph Barjis, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Jörg Becker, University of Münster, Germany
Reinhardt Botha, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa
Jason Cohen, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Rainer Endl, University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Ulrich Frank, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Naoki Fukuta, Shizuoka University, Japan
Peter Funk, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Fabien Gandon, INRIA, France 
Martin Hepp, Universität der Bundeswehr, Germany
Manfred Jeusfeld, Tilburg University, The Netherlands 
Dimitris Karagiannis, University of Vienna, Austria
Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Machdel Matthee, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Rainer Telesko, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland
Barbara Thönssen, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland
Darelle van Greunen, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa
Holger Wache, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland
Rosina Weber, Drexel University, USA
Mathias Weske, University of Potsdam, Germany
Takahira Yamaguchi, Keio University, Japan

Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for oral presentation in any of the topics listed above. Only full papers in English will be accepted, and the length of the paper should not exceed 10 pages.
Instructions for preparing the manuscript (in Word and Latex formats) are available at the conference Paper Templates web page. Please also check the web page with the Submission Guidelines.
Papers should be submitted electronically via the web-based submission system at: http://www.insticc.org/Primoris

Publications
All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings book, under an ISBN reference, and in CD-ROM support.

Registration Information
At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the workshop. If the registration fees are not received by March 17, 2009 the paper will not be published in the workshop proceedings book.

Secretariat Contacts
ICEIS Workshops - AER 2009
e-mail: workshops@iceis.org