Second International Workshop on
Coordination of Inter-Organizational Workflows:
Agent and Semantic Web based
Models (CIOW-2007).
December 3, 2007
http://www.irit.fr/ciow/2007
Within WISE-07
Nancy, France
http://wise2007.loria.fr
This year Selected and Revised Papers will be Published
in a Special Issue of Web Intelligence and Agent Systems Journal (IOS
press)
New Deadline : July 25th 2007
Motivation
& Theme
Workflow systems are widely
adopted by organizations for supporting business processes.
In particular, workflow systems help organizations to coordinate
the different actors involved in the business process by
automating repetitive tasks and facilitating the distribution
of documents, information and control. Today's workflow systems,
however, do not adequately support processes that cross the boundaries
of multiple organizations. The enhancement of workflow systems
in this direction, Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOW), is essential
given the growing need for organizations to cooperate and coordinate
their activities in order to meet the new demands of highly
dynamic and open markets. The different organizations involved
in such cooperation must correlate their respective resources and
skills, and coordinate their respective business processes towards
a common goal, corresponding to a value-added service.
Coordination in IOW raises several
problems such as the definition of the universe
of discourse -without which it would not be possible to solve
the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur between
several autonomous and heterogeneous workflows-, the finding
of partners, the negotiation of the processes themselves between
partners according to certain criteria (due time, precision,
visibility of the process evolution, way of doing it…), and
the synchronization of the distributed and concurrent execution
of these different processes. Moreover, organizations are shifting
from the typical static case of the "virtual enterprises" to a dynamic
case where dynamic relations and alliances are established. Workflow
and process-support tools have been widely studied for this static
case investigating issues concerning inter-operability, process control,
awareness and reliability, etc. The dynamic case has been less
widely examined, and tools developed in the static case cannot be
straightforwardly adapted. Therefore new issues must be considered:
tools and generic models for negotiation and contracts enactment
and monitoring, processes mechanisms for workflow service discovery
and matching, ...
Agent technology provides natural
abstractions to deal with autonomy, distribution, and coordination
which are inherent to IOW. Moreover, when IOW is deployed
in the context of virtual enterprises, agent technology can
help by providing high level organizational concepts to adequately
describe the macro-level dimension of such an alliance. Indeed,
adopting a multi-agent organizational view enables to inherit powerful
and experimented abstractions and representation concepts, like
roles, groups, teams, interactions protocols, responsibilities,
authorities, permissions. These aspects constitute a conceptual tool
that would probably ease an adequate capture and modelling of IOW
organization.
The Semantic Web is also a useful
and complementary enabling technology. It first helps
to represent a shared business view through a common terminology
or ontology. It also provides means to describe, discover
and select relevant workflow services offered by business partners.
Furthermore, the combination
of these two technologies would renew the way to consider
IOW and open enormous opportunities for building advanced
infrastructures to support IOW coordination. Agents would help
to mediate between heterogeneous and autonomous business processes
to obtain consensus representations. Workflow services could
also be agentified and then would be able to negotiate with
peers the qualities of services, their compositions, and more
generally the conditions of their cooperation towards a specific
goal. On the other hand, interaction protocols of such agents would
be recorded in an ontology and selected intelligently at run time
according to the situation.
Main Objective
This workshop will try
to address the following issue: how agent and/or semantic
web technologies can help in designing and implementing adequate
coordination models for Inter-Organizational Workflow. It
is meant to cover foundations, techniques, methodologies and
applications of Inter-Organizational Workflow coordination by
means of Agent and/or Semantic Web technologies. The workshop
is interdisciplinary in nature and open to contributions from
fields as varied as Multi-Agent Systems, Workflow, Cooperative
Information Systems and Semantic Web.
Topics
Possible topics include,
but are not limited to:
-
business process sharing, ontology;
-
coordination mechanisms for IOW;
-
organization-oriented coordination of IOW;
-
interaction protocols between workflows;
-
workflow interaction mining;
-
contracts enactment and monitoring;
-
distributed agent-based workflow enactment;
-
semantic workflow composition;
-
transactions over heterogeneous distributed workflows;
-
techniques for workflow web services;
-
workflow services’ description, discovery and invocation;
-
workflow capacity description language;
-
workflow service agentification;
-
IOW architecture;
-
IOW representation with OWL-S and WSMO;
-
Industrial applications.
Paper Submission
We solicit original papers
not exceeding 12 pages in length (according to the LNCS
format). Submissions will be assessed on their scientific content,
significance, originality, quality and clarity. Each paper will
be reviewed by at least 2 anonymous reviewers.
Submissions should be sent in
PDF format via email to Chihab Hanachi: hanachi@univ-tlse1.fr
At least one author of each accepted
papers must register for the workshop.
Important
Dates
Abstracts submission : June 30, 2007
Paper submission : July, 15, 2007
Paper Submission : July, 25, 2007
Notification of acceptance : August, 15, 2007
Camera Ready : September, 3, 2007
Workshop : December, 3, 2007
Program
Chair
Chihab Hanachi, University Toulouse
1-IRIT laboratory, France,
hanachi@univ-tlse1.fr
Andrea Omicini, DEIS, Alma Mater Studiorum Università
di Bologna, Italy.
andrea.omicini@unibo.it
Nahid Shahmehri
The Laboratory for Intelligent Information Systems, Department
of Comp & Info Sc Linkoping University, Sweden,
nahsh@ida.liu.se
Program Committee
Yamine Aït Ameur, LISI/ENSMA, Poitiers,
France
Eric Andonoff, IRIT, Toulouse, France
Benali Khalid, Loria, Nancy, France
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.
Olivier Boissier, Ecole Nationale Supérieure Mines of Saint-Etienne,
France
Jorge Cardoso, Funchal, Portugal
François Charoy Loria, Nancy, France
Dickson K. W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong
Nirmit Desai, IBM, USA
Jiangbo Dang, Siemens Corporate Research, USA
Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.
Patrick Lambrix, Linkoping University, Sweden.
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts, USA
Hamid Motahari,The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Aris Ouksel, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
Ricardo Rabelo, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil
Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna , Italy.
Samir Tata, Institut National des Télécommunications, France
Farouk Toumani, LIMOS Laboratory, France
José Vidal, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA
Andreas Wombacher, EPFL, Switzerland