CIOW 2006

 CALL FOR PAPERS
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First International Workshop on
Coordination of Inter-Organizational Workflow:
Agent and Semantic Web based Models (CIOW-2006).
May 8, 2006
http://www.irit.fr/ciow
Within AAMAS-06
Hakodate, Japan, 8-12 May 2006
http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/
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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 8 pages in length (according to 
the IEEE format of the AAMAS conference, 
http://www.aamas2005.nl/paper_submissions-old.php ). 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 (or PS) 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
Deadline for Paper Submission: January 15, 2006
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: February 19, 2006
Deadline for Camera-Ready Paper: March 15, 2006
Workshop date: May, 8, 2006.

Program Chair
Chihab Hanachi, IRIT-University Toulouse 1, France

Program Committee
Khalid Ben Ali, University of Nancy, France,
Boualem Benattalah, University of New South Wales, Australia
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.
Olivier Boissier, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines of Saint-Etienne, 
France
Francisco Curbera, IBM, USA
Dickson K. W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong, China
Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, USA
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts, USA
Aris Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
Ricardo Rabelo, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna in Cesena., Italy
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
Nahid Shahmehri, Linkoping University, Sweden
Katia Sycara, CMU, USA
José Vidal, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA