CFP: Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages (CoALa2005)

Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages (CoALa2005)
                     
          September 20, 2005,  Enschede, The Netherlands

     (www.dstc.edu.au/Research/Projects/coala/2005/)

(In conjunction with EDOC2005 Conference, 21-23 September 2005) 
           

                  Call for Papers


ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

The inter-organisational, cross-jurisdictional and collaborative nature
of business today increasingly requires that organizations have more
transparent view of data, information and processes of their partners.
This implies the need for an almost instant access to and a more
reliable and accurate view of the business contract data, including both
static contract definitions and real-time contract execution. However,
contracts are still treated mostly as legal documents disconnected from
other enterprise systems in spite of the fact that they are a central
mechanism for defining interactions and policy framework for
inter-organisational business collaborations. Although contracts are a
key governance mechanism for such collaborations there is currently
inadequate e-business support for using contract information to manage
cross-organisational interactions. In addition, current support for the
management of contracts themselves has an 'inward' focus, namely on
internal enterprise data and processes. The requirements of the extended
enterprise, which includes collaborative arrangements between a company
and its trading partners, increasingly demand a more 'outward'
perspective on enterprise contract management. The importance of
contracts as a governing mechanism for any extended enterprise and the
capabilities of new technologies such as Web Services require new and
better understanding of contracts from enterprise distributed
perspective. 

The first CoALa workshop was held in conjunction with EDOC2004
conference and the best papers from this workshop will be published in a
special issue of Journal of Collaborative Information Systems in 2005.
This second workshop was requested by many participants of CoALa2004.
The aim is to continue providing an opportunity for exchange of ideas
about the enterprise contracts, their role in enterprise systems and new
solutions to these important enterprise problems.

SCOPE

This Workshop will provide a collaborative forum for the participants to
exchange recent or preliminary results, to conduct intensive discussions
on a particular topic, or to coordinate efforts between representatives
of a technical community in the area of Contract Architectures and
Languages. The program committee seeks papers and proposals that address
various aspects of contracts, including enterprise modeling, e-business,
formal and legal aspects with the aim of providing a balanced mix of
presentations from these different perspectives. 

The duration of the workshop is one day and this workshop will be held
on September 20, 2005.


TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Enterprise contract architectures
- Contract as a basis for coordination of cross-organisational
interactions
- Contracts from system theoretic point of view
- Formalisms for expressing contracts
- Contract description languages
- Contract negotiation, validation
- Run-time contract monitoring and enforcement
- Standardisation activities for e-contracts (e.g. legalXML OASIS and
UN/CEFACT): status and directions
- The use of model-driven techniques and tools
- Legal issues associated with electronic contracts
- Tools for drafting and constructing contracts
- Integration of contract management systems with other enterprise
systems, e.g. payment systems and ERP systems
- Contract management requirements for specific contracts, e.g. SLAs,
construction, financial and e-government contracts
- Trust and contract management issues
- Use and applicability of existing standards/initiatives (e.g. Web
Services, BPEL4WS, WS-CDL, RuleML etc)
- Links between contracts and business processes
- Practical experience with contract management systems

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited
to
25 participants and submission of a paper or a position statement is
required. All submissions will be formally peer reviewed. Submissions
should not exceed 8 pages in the IEEE Computer Society format and
include the author's name, affiliation and contact details. They should
be submitted by e-mail as postscript or PDF files before June 20, 2005,
to the Workshop Chairs (coala-org@dstc.edu.au). Workshop proceedings
will be published on the conference CD-ROM, and all accepted papers will
appear in the IEEE Digital Library. The best papers will be considered
for publication in a special issue of a related computer science
journal. At least one author of accepted papers should participate in
the Workshop.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by July 18, 2005. 


IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop papers due:   20 June 2005				
Author notification:   18 July 2005

Final papers due:	     15 August 2005
Workshop date:	     20 September 2005 	

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

- Zoran Milosevic (DSTC, Australia)
- Guido Governatori (Queensland University, Australia)
- Claudio Bartolini (HP Labs, USA)


WORKSHOP PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Jishnu Mukherji (Hewlett-Packard, USA)
- Marek Sergot (Imperial College, UK)
- Heiko Ludwig (IBM TJ Watson, USA)
- Dave Marvit (Fujitsu Laboratories, USA)
- Gerald Quirchmayr (University of Vienna, Austria)
- Martin Schader (University of Mannheim, Germany)
- Boualem Benatallah (UNSW, Australia)
- Peter Linington (Kent University, UK)
- Babak Sadighi (SICS, Sweden)
- Marlon Dumas (QUT, Australia)
- Ron Lee (Florida International University, USA)
- Mike Papazoglou (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
- Antonino Rotolo (University of Bologna)
- John Salasin (DARPA, USA)
- Bill McCarthy (Michigan State University, USA)

Received on Thursday, 21 April 2005 00:40:19 UTC