TAPOCS 2004

The focus of the workshop in on coordination and collaboration issues in open Computational systems. From a general perspective, open computational systems can be conceived as cooperating ensembles of individual agents (humans and artificial) and services, striving to achieve different kind of missions. Examples of open computational systems span from systems for pervasive computing environment, to multiagent systems deployed in industrial manufacturing and military operations, to virtual Internet-based collaborative enterprises. 

In all these contexts, coordination is a fundamental aspect, accounting for some kind of local as well as global coherence of the system behaviour despite of the unpredictability of the environment, the situatedness of the activities and the possible change/evolution of the missions.
Due to the openness and complexity of the scenarios, dynamic observation and construction of the system interaction and coordination space – or rather the articulation of the organisation processes - are fundamental issues, calling for models, infrastructure and tools supporting dynamic change and adaptation of coordination and collaboration strategies, or rather the dynamic riorganisation of system processes and structures.

Moreover, the notion of system coherence deals with organization and control of behavioral phenomena. It is therefore of fundamental importance for cooperative and collaborative systems developing models, infrastructures and tools enabling scientists and engineers to predict the cause and effect of behavior in the systems. In this endeavor, methodological approaches are needed both for guiding engineers to apply certain methods and tools in building and mantaining open computational systems, and for supporting scientists to make empirical investigation about behaviour of the systems.

The workshop on Theory and Practice of Open Computational Systems (TAPOCS) aims at providing a forum for discussing experiences and explorations about these issues.

TAPOCS topics of interest include, but are not limited too:

• Collaboration & Coordination in autonomic computing
• Adaptive cooperation and coordination in open computational systems
• Systemic qualities of open computational systems 
• Sustainable coordination and cooperation in open computational systems
• Measurement of systemic qualities of open computational systems
• Offensive design of coordination and collaboration in open organisations
• Self-organisation and emergent behaviour in open computational  systems
• Observation issues in open computational systems
• Sustainable behaviour of virtual societies 
• Articulation of works in open collaborative environments
• Coordination technologies, infrastructures, and tools for open computational systems
• Tools for open computational systems observation & visualisation