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International workshop on Decision-oriented Business
Applications: Experiences and Challenges (DOBA)

September 5, 2011

co-located with the IEEE CEC'11
Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

Paper submission: Jul 04, 2011

http://ontorule-project.eu/dissemination/events/doba

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DOBA intends to gather together the community of business users in charge
of decision-support business applications. The workshop will be a means for
practitioners to share and exchange experiences, best practices, critical
visions, success stories, and to define a possible roadmap to the future.


Important dates
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* Submission deadline: Jul 4, 2011
* Notification of acceptance: Jul 11, 2011
* Camera-ready paper submission: Jul 25, 2011
* Workshop: Sept 5, 2011


Description
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Decision-oriented applications are complex due to the underlying business
policies and require the participation of many stakeholders, from business
experts over analysts to IT developers. In current practice, business users
do not own their applications, as their construction and maintenance inevitably
require having other agents involved. In the recent years, progress has been
made in standardization of modeling and knowledge representation languages,
as well as advances in methodologies and theoretical foundations for policy
acquisition and execution. It is becoming increasingly feasible to reduce the
coupling between policies and their implementations, and to empower users to
independently interact with the part of a business application that is relevant
to them, including the decision modeling process. One approach towards achieving
this objective is to separate understandably the representation of the knowledge
at the business, operational and execution levels, on the one hand; and the
business vocabulary from the business rules, on the other. At the same time,
it must be possible to merge them at any moment in order to provide integrated
ownership, combined execution and consistency checking.


Topics of interest
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The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Lessons learnt in business modeling using business languages
* From models to solutions: transforming business specifications into rule-based software
* Acquisition of business policies from text: NLP in action
* Integrated management and maintenance of business models, ontologies and rules
* Decision-modeling to bridge the gap between business requirements and implementations
* Experiences in efficiency and scalability of BRMS and reasoners
* Best practices for consistency maintenance of ontologies and rules over time
* End-to-end coherence: traceability and change propagation
* BRMS tools interoperability: standards and open challenges
* Giving ownership of business applications back to business users
* Appropriate languages for business knowledge reuse and adaptability
* Usability in decision-support business applications
* Model documentation: understanding business policies
* Experiences in cost reduction and improved time to market using ontologies and rules combinations
* Use cases for state-of-the-art decision-support systems: actual requirements and expected benefits


Submissions
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The following types of contributions are welcomed:

* Full papers, up to 8 pages.
* Position papers, up to 5 pages.
* Posters (both 2-page extended abstracts or final posters).


Workshop Chairs
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* Patrick Albert, IBM, France
* Roman Korf, ontoprise, Germany
* Emilio Rubiera, Fundación CTIC, Spain


Program Committee
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* Diego Berrueta, Fundación CTIC, Spain
* Christian De Sainte Marie, IBM, France
* Adil El Ghali, IBM, France
* Miguel Iglesias, ArcelorMittal, Spain
* Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers, PNA, Netherlands
* Eva Maria Kiss, ontoprise, Germany
* Luis Polo, Fundación CTIC, Spain
* Peter Rosina, Audi, Germany