3rd International Workshop on
Ontology-Driven Information Systems Engineering

co-located with CAiSE 2011 (London, 20-24 June 2011)
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~cssrssc/events/odise2011


THEME

Information systems (IS) Engineering has progressed considerably over the decades. Numerous advances, such as improved development methodologies, languages that enforce recognised software engineering principles and sophisticated CASE tools, have helped to increase the quality of IS. Regardless of such progress many IS Engineering projects remain unsuccessful (e.g., fail to meet stakeholder requirements, run excessively over budget and far beyond the deadlines initially scheduled). As the literature points out, most of these problems are due to (1) the difficulties of capturing and knowing the business requirements of a living organisational system, (2) realising such requirements in software designs and implementations and (3) maintaining an effective level of synchronicity between the needs of the living system and its information system. The causes underlying such problems are diverse and difficult to identify. Nonetheless it is plausible to assume that at the heart of such IS Engineering problems is the difficulty to conceptualise an organisational system and its real-world problem domains.

Ontologies are rapidly becoming mainstream within IS engineering as a means to create conceptual models of the real world that are both formalised and semantically accurate. Whilst ontologies have been in recent times widely researched by the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence communities, limited research has been conducted on how ontologies can help to shape and improve IS Engineering in terms of both the development process and the conceptual/physical artefacts produced. Ontologies have the potential to positively drive all phases of the IS lifecycle, from business modelling to implementation, and contribute to shape Information Systems Engineering so as to more effectively evolve software solutions that align with organisational requirements and address the issues emerging from large complex families of IT systems.

This workshop is aimed at promoting, investigating and discussing Ontology-Driven Information Systems Engineering (ODISE, pronounced odyssey) by bringing together researchers and industrial practitioners interested is ways in which ontologies can impact IS Engineering. The scope of ODISE includes broad areas such as: (1) Foundational ontological principles and paradigms that can influence novel or existing modelling/programming languages; (2) Improved traceability between phases and modelled artefacts via ontologies; and (3) Ways in which ontologies drive or refine typical development phases and the lifecycle as a whole. More specifically topics include, but are not limited to:

- Ontology as a means to inform the process of gathering requirements.
- Ontology as a means to inform architecture development directly from requirements specifications.
- Ontology as a means to inform the software design directly from the architecture specification.
- Ontology as a means to model the software development process and the software product itself.
- Ontologies as run-time artefacts or to inform the design of run-time artefacts.
- The role of ontology reasoning in the software engineering process.
- The role of ontologies in model-driven development.
- Philosophical ontologies (3D vs. 4D) and their role in IS development
- Comparison of different ODISE mechanisms (e.g. domain-specific modelling, profiling, etc.).
- Comparison of the role of foundational ontologies vs. domain ontologies in ODISE.
- Ontology driven development of service software.
- Methodological issues for ODISE.
- Problems of semantic mismatch between traditional IS modelling paradigms, approaches, techniques, etc. and ontological modelling.
- Ontology-based development/modelling/programming languages.

The ODISE workshop is aimed at promoting discussion among the workshop participants, identifying key research areas of Ontology-Driven Information Systems Engineering and fostering future research collaborations in the form of joint research projects and/or papers.


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper abstracts: 14 February 2011
Paper submissions: 21 February 2011
Notification of acceptance: 7 March 2011
Camera-ready copies: 28 March 2011
Workshop: 20 or 21 June 2011

SUBMISSION

Authors are invited to submit papers by e-mail to Sergio de Cesare (sergio.decesare@brunel.ac.uk), the workshop's primary contact. Submissions can be in the form of full research papers or experience reports (up to 10 pages) or short position papers (up to 6 pages).

Accepted research papers will be published in the CAiSE 2011 workshop proceedings with Springer's Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Please note that experience reports and position papers will only be published on the workshop Web site only.


ORGANISERS

Sergio de Cesare (Brunel University, U.K.)
Frederik Gailly (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Grant Holland (NuTech Solutions, USA)
Mark Lycett (Brunel University, U.K.)
Chris Partridge (BORO Solutions, U.K.)