Antoni Olive - Böcker

This is a compilation of papers presented at the "Information System Concepts" conference in Marburg, Germany. The special focus is consolidation and harmonisation of the numerous and widely diverging views in the field of information systems. This book should be of interest to researchers/lecturers in information systems, informatics, computer science, software developers, systems analysts, R&D, information system design tool developers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of four international workshops held in conjunction with the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2002, in Tampere, Finland in October 2002.The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on management of time and changes in information systems; architectures, models, and tools for systems evolution; conceptual modeling approaches to mobile information systems development; quality of conceptual models; requirements and entity relationship models; class models and architectures; Web and interactive models; processes, models, and Web services; e-business methods and technologies; and success factors for conceptual modeling in e-business.

It is now more than fifty years since the first paper on formal specifications of an information system was published by Young and Kent. Even if the term “conceptual model” was not used at that time, the basic intention of the abstract specification was to a large extent the same as for developing conceptual models today: to arrive at a precise, abstract, and hardware - dependent model of the informational and time characteristics of a data processing problem. The abstract notation should enable the analyst to - ganize the problem around any piece of hardware. In other words, the p- pose of an abstract specification was for it to be used as an invariant basis for designing different alternative implementations, perhaps even using different hardware components. Research and practice of abstract modeling of information systems has since the late fifties progressed through many milestones and achie- ments. In the sixties, pioneering work was carried out by the CODASYL Development committee who in 1962 presented the “Information Al- bra”. At about the same time Börje Langefors published his elementary message and e-file approach to specification of information systems. The next decade, the seventies, was characterized by the introduction of a large number of new types of, as they were called, “data models”. We saw the birth of, for instance, Binary Data Models, Entity Relationship Models, Relational Data Models, Semantic Data Models, and Temporal Deductive Models.

Conceptual modeling has long been recognized as the primary means to enable so- ware development in information systems and data engineering. Nowadays, conc- tual modeling has become fundamental to any domain in which organizations have to cope with complex, real-world systems. Conceptual modeling fosters communi- tion between information systems developers and end-users, and it has become a key mechanism for understanding and representing computing systems and environments of all kinds, including the new e-applications and the information systems that support them. The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling provides the premiere - rum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which the - jor emphasis is on conceptual modeling. Topics of interest span the entire spectrum of conceptual modeling including research and practice in areas such as theories of c- cepts and ontologies underlying conceptual modeling, methods and tools for devel- ing and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conc- tual models into effective implementations. Moreover, new areas of conceptual mod- ing broaden its application to include interdependencies with knowledge-based, lo- cal, linguistic, and philosophical theories and approaches. The conference also makes major strides in fostering collaboration and exchange between academia and industry. In this year’s conference, research papers focused on XML, Web services, business modeling, conceptual modeling applied to human-computer interaction, quality in conceptual modeling, conceptual modeling applied to interoperability, requirements modeling, reasoning, the Semantic Web, and metadata management. The call for papers attracted 158 research papers, whose authors represent 27 differentcountries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE'97, held in Barcelona, Spain, in June 1997. The volume presents 30 revised full papers selected from a total of 112 submissions; also included is one invited contribution. The book is divided into topical sections on requirements engineering; information systems design; methods, environments, and tools; distributed information systems; and workflow systems.

Conceptual modeling has long been recognized as the primary means to enable so- ware development in information systems and data engineering. Conceptual modeling provides languages, methods and tools to understand and represent the application domain; to elicit, conceptualize and formalize system requirements and user needs; to communicate systems designs to all stakeholders; and to formally verify and validate systems design on high levels of abstraction. The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling provides a premiere forum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which the major emphasis is on conceptual modeling. Topics of interest span the entire spectrum of conceptual modeling including research and practice in areas such as theories of concepts and ontologies underlying conceptual modeling, methods and tools for - veloping and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conceptual models into effective implementations. The scientific program of ER 2008 featured several activities running in parallel. The core activity was the presentation of the 33 research papers published in this volume, which were selected by a large Program Committee (PC) Co-chaired by Qing Li, Stefano Spaccapietra and Eric Yu. We thank the PC Co-chairs, the PC members and the additional referees for the hard work done, often within a short time. Thanks are also due to Moira Norrie from ETH Zurich, Oscar Pastor from the Universitat Politècnica de València, and Amit Sheth from the Wright State Univ- sity for accepting our invitation to present keynotes.