DMC 2005

Business processes and distributed collaboration have been changing radically over the last years. Business environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration between people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to move across organizational boundaries and to collaborate with others within/between organizations and communities. The ability to query the company's distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but new paradigms such as Service-oriented computing (e.g. Web Services), increased pervasiveness, and mobility enable new scenarios and lead to higher complexity of systems. Some questions include: How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while displaced in a different point of the enterprise? What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out? How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the fixed network infrastructure is absent or cannot be used? How will Service-oriented computing change collaborative software?

Software architectures for distributed and mobile cooperative communities must support the fundamental requirements for distributed cooperation: efficient information sharing across a widely distributed enterprise environment; constant and timely update and placement of the distributed knowledge base with many different sites acting both as potential users and potential providers of information; shared access to a set of services. The approaches and technologies for supporting these new ways of work are still the subject of research. Nevertheless, they are likely to "borrow" concepts and technologies from a variety of fields, such as workflow systems, groupware and CSCW, event-based systems, software architecture, distributed database systems, mobile computing, and so on. A particularly interesting line of research is exploring a peer-to-peer paradigm enriched with sharing abstractions in which each network node is both a potential user and provided of information for the rest of the community.

Topics include, but not are limited to:

• Collaborative Services
  • Coordination models, languages, and systems for distributed and mobile teamwork
  • Service Oriented Computing – models and architectures for loosely coupled teamwork
  • Methodologies and techniques for web service composition and collaboration
  • Services for adaptive collaboration
  • Interaction patterns for distributed and mobile collaboration
• Business process collaboration
  • Collaborative business processes – description, modeling and composition
  • Standards for business process modeling, collaboration, and choreography
  • Cross-organizational business process support, contracts
  • Security, privacy and trust in business process collaboration
  • Ontology-based business process description, management and collaboration
• Mobile collaboration
  • Agent-based mobile collaboration
  • Collaborative applications for mobile users
  • Service quality in mobile collaboration
  • Context-aware collaboration
  • Mobile and pervasive collaboration systems
• Middleware and platforms for distributed and mobile collaboration
  • Middleware for mobile teamwork support
  • Peer-to-peer services (modeling and enactment issues)
  • Systems for ad hoc and virtual (project) communities
  • Infrastructure support for mobile collaboration
  • Event-based, publish/subscribe and message-oriented middleware