James G. Nell - Böcker

The organizational paradigms of global co-operation and collaboration require alternative ways and means for their support. Information and communication technology (ICT) can and will play a significant role in this support. However, the many available and seemingly conflicting solutions, the confusing terminology, the lack of business justification, and last but not least the insufficient understanding of the technology by the end user community has significantly hampered the large scale application of the relevant ICT support and thereby the acceptance of the new paradigms. Many of these issues have been addressed in the workshops of the international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organizational Integration, which has been supported by the European IST Programme and NIST. The main subjects of the initiative are: relations between knowledge management and business process modelling, interoperability of business processes and process models, enterprise engineering and integration, and representation of process models.Ontologies and agent technologies - the latter with their relations to ontologies and models - have been further subjects of discussions in several workshops. Results of the initiative are reported in this volume, which comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology (ICEIMT'02). The conference was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Valencia, Spain in April 2002. The text provides, not only a wealth of information on the state of the art of the subjects of the initiative, but also identifies opportunities for research and development.

The international initiative on Enterprise Inter- and Intra-Organisational Integration (EI3-IC) had the objective to increase both international consen­ sus (IC) and public awareness on enterprise integration.