Christoph Bussler - Böcker

The Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was heldMay27-28,2002inconjunctionwithCAiSE02,the14thInternationalC- ferenceonAdvancedInformationSystemsEngineering.Theworkshopcomprised three tracks: a track on Web services co-chaired by Barbara Pernici (Politecnico di Milano) and Jian Yang (Tilburg University); a track on e-business, co-chaired byMariaE.Orlowska(UniversityofQueensland)andChristophBussler(Oracle Corporation, USA); and a track on e-services and the Semantic Web, co-chaired byRickHull(BellLaboratories,LucentTechnologies,USA)andSheilaMcIlraith (Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, USA). The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the web to deliver their goods and services, to ?nd trading partners, and to link theirexisting(maybelegacy)applicationstootherapplications.Webservicesare rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed c- putation and application framework.On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting so- ware applications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accu- lated that demonstrates the di?erence between just having an online presence andusingtheWebasastrategicandfunctionalmediumine-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as in marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifactstoenableautomatedreasoningaboutthem.Whenappliedtoe-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in May 2004.The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology engineering, ontology matching and mapping, ontology-based querying, ontology merging and population, infrastructure, semantic web services, service discovery and composition, data from the semantic web, knowledge presentation, applications, content management, and information management and integration.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2003, held in June 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003.The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited contributions were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers address the following topics: enterprise application integration, ontologies and the semantic Web, meta-workflows, workflow systems, e-services, semantic Web queries, e-markets, electronic service contracts, context modeling for Web information systems, Web service middleware, Web service offerings language, WSOL, Web service description, Web service composition, and Web service coordination.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applications, AIMSA 2004, held in Varna, Bulgaria in September 2004. The 52 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology engineering, semantic Web services, knowledge representation and processing, machine learning and data mining, natural language processing, soft computing, neural networks, e-learning systems, multiagent systems, pattern recognition, intelligent decision making, and information retrieval.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the two workshops held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2004 in Brisbane, Australia in November 2004.The 21 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontologies for networked systems, mobile learning, fragmentation versus integration perspectives of the web information systems discipline, and web services quality.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004.The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

The 6th Workshop on Technologies for E-Services (TES-05) was held September 2-3, 2005, in conjunction with the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2005) in Trondheim, Norway. The next generation of applications will be developed in the form of services that are offered over a network, either a company's intranet or the Internet. Service-based architectures depend on an infrastructure that allows service providers to describe and advertise their services and service consumers to discover and select the services that best fulfill their requirements. Frameworks and messaging protocols for e-services in stationary and mobile environments are being developed and standardized, metadata and ontologies are being defined, and mechanisms are under development for service composition, delivery, monitoring, and payment. End-to-end security and quality of service guarantees will be essential for the acceptance of e-services. As e-services become pervasive, e-service management will play a central role. The workshop's objective is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to present new developments and experience reports. The goal of the TES workshop is to identify the technical issues, models, and infrastructures that enable enterprises to provide e-services to other businesses and individual customers. In response to the call for submissions, 40 papers were submitted, out of which the Program Committee selected 10 high-quality submissions for presentation at the wo- shop. Unfortunately, one author had to withdraw, and the remaining nine papers that were presented are included in these proceedings.

Six parallel Business Process Management workshops were held on September 5th, 2005, in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2005) in Nancy, France. This was the first time BPM had asso- ated workshops, and the workshop program was a great success. The topics of the workshops ranged from fundamental process modeling primitives to the recently emerged field of Web service choreography and orchestration, rep- sented in the “Workshop on Business Processes and Services” and the “Workshop on Web Service Choreography and Orchestration;” a topic which intersects the research fields of business process management and Web services. Another strong focus was on business process design and business process intelligence, emerging areas that have gained increasing importance in supporting business process reengineering to derive superior process designs. These topics were covered in the respective wo- shops. A widely discussed topic in several sessions was business process interoperability in the workshop on “Enterprise and Networked Enterprises Interoperability.” Finally, the last workshop in these proceedings called “Business Process Reference Models” aimed at discussing different views on reference models in order to come to a c- mon understanding of the terms involved. We would like to thank the workshop organizers for their efforts in the workshop preparation, the organization of the review process, the exciting workshop programs and their management onsite and for their cooperation in the post-publication process.

Welcome to the second International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services (DEECS 2006) in conjunction with the 8th IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology and the third IEEE Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services. The purpose of the DEECS workshop is to provide an annual forum for exchange of state-of-the-art research and development in e-commerce and services. Since the increasing demand on e-commerce and services, we are witnessing a continuing growth of interest in the workshop. The increased number of submissions this year includes a record number from Asia. We received 47 papers: 6 from North/South America, 9 from Europe, and 32 from Asia. Of these, 15 regular papers and 8 short papers were accepted. The technical program reflects an increasing development of principles in service engineering, service-oriented architecture, data and knowledge engineering, and business models and analysis. It also reflects an increased emphasis on system and tool implementation, and applications to service practices, evidencing a maturation of the underlying principles.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration.The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.

st The 1 Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise (BIRTE nd 2006) was held on September 11, 2006 in conjunction with the 32 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2006) in Seoul, Korea. The - location with VLDB is very important as the topic of the workshop was centered on different aspects in the lifecycle of business intelligence on very large enterprise-wide operational real-time data sets. In today’s competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to und- stand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is not longer adequate; users now - mand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time business data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high-quality information.

A decade ago Tim Berners-Lee proposed an extraordinary vision: despite the p- nomenal success of the Web, it would not, and could not, reach its full potential unless it became a place where automated processes could participate as well as people. This meant the publication of documents and data to the web in such a way that they could be interpreted, integrated, aggregated and queried to reveal new connections and answer questions, rather than just browsed and searched. Many scoffed at this idea, interpreting the early emphasis on language design and reas- ing as AI in new clothes. This missed the point. The Grand Challenge of the Semantic Web is one that needs not only the information structure of ontologies, metadata, and data, but also the computational infrastructure of Web Services, P2P and Grid distributed computing and workflows. Consequently, it is a truly who- system and multi-disciplinary effort. This is also an initiative that has to be put into practice. That means a pragmatic approach to standards, tools, mechanisms and methodologies, and real, challenging examples. It would seem self-evident that the Semantic Web should be able to make a major contribution to clinical information discovery. Scientific commu- ties are ideal incubators: knowledge-driven, fragmented, diverse, a range of str- tured and unstructured resources with many disconnected suppliers and consumers of knowledge. Moreover, the clinicians and biosciences have embraced the notions of annotation and classification using ontologies for centuries, and have dema- ing requirements for trust, security, fidelity and expressivity.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration.The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.

The Semantic Web is a vision -- the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in such a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. However, there is a widespread misconception that the Semantic Web is a rehash of existing AI and database work. Kashyap, Bussler, and Moran dispel this notion by presenting the multi-disciplinary technological underpinnings such as machine learning, information retrieval, service-oriented architectures, and grid computing. Thus they combine the informational and computational aspects needed to realize the full potential of the Semantic Web vision.