ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

Interoperability is the ability of separate entities, systems or artifacts (organizations, programs, tools, etc.) to work together. Although there has always been the need to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous systems and notations, the difficulties involved in overcoming their differences, the lack of consensus on the common standards to use and the shortage of proper mechanisms and tools, have severely hampered this task.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an emergent discipline that advocates the use of (software) models as primary artifacts of the software engineering process. In addition to the initial goals of being useful to capture user requirements and architectural concerns, and to generate code from them, models are proving to be effective for many other engineering tasks. New model-driven engineering approaches, such as model-driven modernization, models-at-runtime, model-based testing, etc. are constantly emerging.

Model interoperability is much more complex than simply defining a local serialization format, e.g., XMI. This would just resolve the syntactic (or “plumbing”) issues between models and modeling tools. However, interoperability should also involve further aspects, including behavioral specifications of models (which in turn describe the behavioral aspects of the systems being modeled), and other “semantic” issues such as agreements on names, context-sensitive information, agreements on concepts (ontologies), integration conflict analysis (including for example automatic data model matching), semantic reasoning, etc. Furthermore, interoperability not only means being able to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged, but also to exchange services and functions to operate effectively together.

Models and MDE techniques (especially metamodeling and model transformations) can play a fundamental role for fully accomplishing these tasks. Thus, models can become cornerstone elements for enabling and achieving interoperability between all kinds of systems and artifacts, including data sets (under the presence of different data schemata, and possibly at different levels of abstraction), services (despite their differences in data representation, access protocols and underlying technological platforms), event systems (with different complex types and origins), languages (that use different notations and may have different semantics), tools (with different data formats and semantic representations), technological platforms (with different notations, tools and semantics), etc.

SCOPE

The goal of this workshop is to discuss the potential role of models as key enablers for interoperability, and the challenges ahead. It aims to provide a venue where researchers and practitioners concerned with all aspects of models and systems interoperability could meet, disseminate and exchange ideas and problems, identify some of the key issues related to model-driven interoperability, and explore together possible solutions.

The duration of the workshop is one day and will be held on October 3-5, 2010.

TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Precise specification of models, metamodels and their properties.
* Precise notations of compatibility/composition of models and metamodels (for, e.g., DSL combination).
* Automated tool support for constructing, analyzing, comparing and composing models.
* Definition of underlying formal frameworks that allow automated reasoning about model interoperability.
* Requirements for interoperability: challenges and roadmap.
* Tool metamodeling.
* Use of existing MDE technologies for interoperability (model transformation, model weaving, model differencing, model evolution, …).
* Analysis of current standards and proposals for extensions to standards to enable interoperability.
* Industrial and experience reports on interoperability.
* Architectures for MDI.
* Integration between Business and IT models.
* Model transformation for Semantic Interoperability.
* Ontological and semantic support for MDI.
* Reverse engineering of Information Systems and MDI.
* Taxonomy of interoperability problems and solutions.
* Methods and support for achieving interoperability through models.

Submissions

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submissions should be between 4 and 14 pages long in standard LNCS format. They have to include the authors' names, affiliations and contact details. Submissions are due on July 25, 2010 and should be submitted in PDF format via http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mdi2010.

At least one author of every accepted paper should register for the conference and participate in the workshop.

During the workshop there will be some sessions for presenting position papers and a plenary working session for summarizing, evaluating and assembling the research results and for identifying future research and project opportunities.

IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper submission: July 25, 2010
* Author notification: August 25, 2010
* Camera-ready versions: September 15, 2010
* Workshop date: October 3-5, 2010

Committees

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

* Jean Bézivin INRIA and Ecole de Mines de Nantes, France.
* Richard Soley OMG, Needham, USA
* Antonio Vallecillo University of Málaga, Spain

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Patrick Albert, IBM, France
* Uwe Assmann, Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany
* Colin Atkinson, University of Mannheim, Germany
* Jorn Bettin, Sofismo AG, Germany
* Jean Pierre Bourey, Laboratoire de Génie Industriel de Lille, France
* Tony Clark, Middlesex University, UK
* Robert Clarisó, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
* Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany
* Jean Marie Favre, University of Grenoble, France
* Robert France, Colorado University, USA
* Dragan Gasevic, Atabasca University, Canada
* Sébastien Gérard, CEA LIST, France
* Martin Gogolla, University of Bremen, Germany
* Jeff Gray, University of Alabama, USA
* Esther Guerra, Carlos III University, Spain
* Tihamer Levendovszky, Vanderbilt University, USA
* Richard Paige, University of York, UK
* Alfonso Pierantonio, University of L'Aquila, Italy
* Bernhard Rumpe, Aachen University, Germany
* Jim Steel, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
* Hans Vangheluwe, University of Antwerp, Belgium
* Andrew Watson, OMG, Needham, USA
* Jon Whittle, Lancaster University, UK
* Manuel Wimmer, Viena University of Technology, Austria