ICEIMT’02 Conference of the EI3-IC Initiative


The ICEIMT'02 (International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modelling Technology)  was held at the University Polytechnic of Valencia, Spain, on 2002-04-24/26, with an attendance of over 70 people from academia and industry coming from all five continents - Africa (South Africa), America (Canada, USA), Asia (China and Japan), Australia, and Europe (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and UK).

The conference had only one stream of presentations and the agenda was organised according to the themes of the preceding workshops. Each of the four workshop themes sessions

  • Knowledge management in inter- and intra-organization environments (WS 1)
  • Enterprise inter- and intra-organization engineering and integration (WS 2)
  • Interoperability of business processes and enterprise models (WS 3)
  • Common representation of enterprise models (WS 4)
started with an overview paper on the subject followed by the workgroup reports. Papers on selected topics provided additional information on the different subjects. The opening sessions started with welcome addresses by the Valencia regional government and the University followed by presentations from the two main sponsors – the European Commission and NIST - and a key note paper on enterprise modelling. A special session at the end of the conference provided information on international projects. 

The closing session of the conference was devoted to a discussion on the future of the initiative on international consensus. The planning for next steps identified discrete areas of need. These are described in the below action list:

  • Establish an educational program to create a science of enterprise integration, to be supported by the Enterprise Integration Laboratory (EIL) of Toronto University .
  • Create a publication venue, to be implemented via the first EI conference in Toronto in 2004. The rationale for the conference is primarily to provide a publication forum, feeding existing journals or perhaps creating a new one. 
  • Continue the workshop process: The value of the ICEIMT workshops as the primary vehicle for sharing ideas is well recognised, getting reality checks, and establishing consensus research directions. The preference was for more frequency, perhaps yearly. 
  • Support EI standards: The reasoning was that the EI community depends on standards as a key strategy and focus for interaction. 
  • Form, propose and execute research projects: Obviously, there is much interest in proposing projects to the EU Sixth Framework Program, which seems well disposed to the EI agenda. 
  • Support the vendor base: A vendor suggested a frequently-updated "handbook of enterprise integration." 
  • Outreach to parallel communities: As EI is highly interdisciplinary, the importance of outreach to other disciplines is essential. The web connection has been noted, and also the cogent academic disciplines. Of special interest is the human factors community.
  • Develop a clear business case, which will probably be satisfied through practical user consciousness in the above listed actions.
Abstracts of the papers including the summary of the group reports have been included in the conference brochure and have been distributed as part of the conference handouts.  Most abstracts are or will become available at the CIMOSA website and the NIST website. The conference proceedings will also contain selected papers presented at the EI3-IC workshops. The proceedings will be published by Kluwer Academic Publisher  in 3Q/2002 . 
 

More information at http://www.cimosa.de/EI3-IC/index1.html
 

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