The growth of the Internet and the widespread of e-commerce systems have accentuated pre-existing problems related with systems interoperability and the definition of common semantics throughout business organisations. Communication and exchange of data and information between business systems is nowadays dependent on the definition, modelling, design and implementation of underlying concepts shared across organisations. The issues involved are not just related to infrastructure and technology. Indeed fundamental problems exist around the understanding of what ‘concepts’ are shared, how they relate and what mechanisms should be adopted to allow systems to communicate and interoperate at all levels.
Genericity mechanisms, such as patterns, frameworks and components, have the potential for defining, modelling, designing and implementing shared concepts. Such mechanisms have inherited many object-oriented principles and built upon them to enhance the generalised nature of business problems and solutions both vertically (within the same domain) and horizontally (across different domains). Increasingly, these are supported by emerging ‘ontological’ definitions and related languages (e.g. XML) designed to exemplify genericity. The potential contribution of XML to the definition of business ontologies and semantics is also relevant. Researchers and practitioners world-wide are exploring the possibility of defining interoperable industry specifications based on XML and the definition of an Ontology Markup Language.
The adoption and implementation of genericity mechanisms and ontological ‘tools’ is difficult to implement in ‘greenfield’ situations. These difficulties are exacerbated in ‘brownfield’ situations in which clear architectural separations do not exist and multiple technologies do exist
In light of this the aim of the workshop is to discuss:
The workshop will follow these phases:
This workshop is addressed to
all academics, researchers and practitioners interested in all approaches aimed
at achieving the integration of enterprise systems. Papers submitted to the workshop will be reviewed by a committee of five
members. The committee is composed of the workshop organisers, an external
academic and two industrial practitioners.
Please refer to http://www.site-project.org.uk/events/ecoop2001_workshop/ for additional information.