DOBA 2011

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

(workshop co-located with the 13th The IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC'11), Luxembourg, September 5-7, 2011)

CANCELLED. Due to the number of submissions, this event has been cancelled. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Description of the Workshop

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.

The goal of this workshop is 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.

Topics of interest

• 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

We are inviting the submission of full papers (up to 8 pages), position papers (up to 5) and posters (both 2-page extended abstracts or final posters) focusing on the aforementioned or related topics and representing original research. Please follow the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines to prepare your papers with 8.5'' x 11'', two-column format. All submissions will be critically reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. For paper submission we use the EasyChair conference management system.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Jun 24, 2011 Jul 4, 2011
• Notification of acceptance: Jul 11, 2011
• Camera-ready paper submission: Jul 25, 2011
• Workshop: September 5, 2011 (cancelled)

Organizing Committee

• Patrick Albert, IBM, France
• Roman Korf, ontoprise, Germany
• Emilio Rubiera, Fundación CTIC, Spain

Program Committee

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

Venue

The workshop is colocated with the 13th The IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC'11), and will take place at Luxembourg on September 5-7, 2011.

Registration

Participants of the workshop may register to the main conference without any additional fee for attending the workshop track.