4th International Workshop on Distributed and Mobile Collaboration (DMC 2006)

at the 15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE-2006), University of Manchester, UK, June 26-28, 2006

Latest infos

General Information

Business processes and distributed collaboration have been changing radically over the last years. Business environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration among people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to move across organizational boundaries and to collaborate among/in organizations and communities. The ability to query the company's distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but new paradigms such as service-oriented computing increased pervasiveness, and mobility enable new scenarios and lead to higher complexity of systems. Independently of the business domain, private "collaboration" has become a hot issue. Virtual communities and so-called "social networks" have enjoyed a tremendous popularity recently and are starting to require functionalities for collaboration in the broadest sense similar to those in business environments. The wide-spread availability of mobile devices makes support for mobility an arising topic in this domain as well.

Many questions to fully enable such scenarios are still subject to ongoing research. For example: How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while not being in their home environment? What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out? How can resources be described semantically in a meaningful way to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways of providing data relevant to the user, enabling improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and deciding when and how to process data? How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the fixed network infrastructure is absent or cannot be used? How will service-oriented computing change collaborative software?

Workshop Activities and Goals

Software architectures for distributed and mobile cooperative communities must support the fundamental requirements for distributed cooperation: efficient and semantically enhanced information sharing across a widely distributed environment; constant and timely update of distributed knowledge bases with many different sites acting both as potential users and potential providers of information; shared access to a services; security and trust in these environments, etc. These cross-cutting questions require an interdisciplinary view on the domain and input from a variety of fields, such as workflow systems, groupware and CSCW, event-based systems, software architecture, distributed database systems, mobile computing, etc. A particularly interesting line of research is exploring the peer-to-peer paradigm, enriched with sharing abstractions in which each network node is both a potential user and provider of information.

In this workshop we plan to address the interdisciplinary issues of the domain and bring together researchers from distributed systems, workflow, CSCW, mobile data management, databases, knowledge management/semantics, and software engineering to discuss the common interests, share and exchange expertise and results, appreciate each other's results and contributions, and to provide application developers with facilities (middleware, infrastructures, architectures, etc.) that enable the development and deployment of applications supporting distributed collaboration in mobile and pervasive environments.

Topics

We encourage submissions in the areas of distributed systems, workflow, CSCW, mobile data management, databases, knowledge management/semantics, and software engineering which specifically focus on distributed and mobile collaboration. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Coordination models, languages, and systems for distributed and mobile collaboration
Models and architectures for loosely-coupled teamwork
Models and enabling infrastructures for adaptive collaboration
Interaction patterns for distributed and mobile collaboration
Cross-organizational process support and contracts
Security, privacy, and trust in business process collaboration
Semantic process description, management, and collaboration
Semantic data management for distributed and mobile collaboration
Exploiting context information such as network context, social context, and system context, and enabling infrastructures to support collaboration in distributed and mobile environments
Data placement and storage in distributed and mobile environments
Peer-to-peer based collaboration
Support for ad-hoc and virtual communities
Event-based, publish/subscribe and message-oriented middleware
Collaborative applications for mobile users
Quality of service in mobile collaboration
Context-aware collaboration
Case studies

Committees

Program Chairs

Manfred Hauswirth, EPFL, Switzerland
Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover, Germany

Steering Committe

Harald Gall, University of Zürich, Switzerland
Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

Program Committee

Heidrun Allert, FH Hagenberg, Austria

Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

Harald Gall, University of Zürich, Switzerland

Paul Grefen, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Clemens Kerer, Microsoft Corporation, USA

Engin Kirda, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

John Krogstie, SINTEF and Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology, Norway

Heiko Ludwig, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, United Arab Emirates

Cecilia Mascolo, University College London, UK

Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Ivana Podnar, EPFL, Switzerland

Thomas Risse, Fraunhofer IPSI, Germany

David S. Rosenblum, University College London, UK

Kai-Uwe Sattler, TU Ilmenau, Germany

Wolf Siberski, L3S, Germany

Marcus Specht, Open University, The Netherlands

Paolo Traverso, ITC/IRST, Italy

Andreas Wombacher, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Program committee web page

Format of the Workshop

The workshop solicits scientific papers that address problems specific to distributed and mobile collaboration environments. Additionally, position papers outlining interesting new research domains and approaches would be welcome. The selection of papers is based primarily on their potential to influence future research. This influence can be exercised in many ways, exemplified by but not limited to the following:

Articulating a new perspective on distributed and mobile collaboration
Describing new problems regarding distributed and mobile collaboration that arise from the distributed and mobile environments and how to address them
Describing a novel approach to an existing problem that promises to influence future research
Describing a new problem that requires our attention
Debunking an old perspective about distributed and mobile collaboration

Program

Time	Topic
09:00	Daily introductions by workshop chairs
09:30	Paper session 1 (25 min + 5 min questions) Massimiliano de Leoni, Fabio De Rosa and Massimo Mecella MOBIDIS: A Pervasive Architecture for Emergency (presentation slides) Best paper Jinqiao Yu, Ramana Reddy, Shufen Liu, Zhilin Yao, Vijayanand Bharadwaj, Sumitra Reddy and Srinivas Kankanahalli EkSarva: Enabling Adaptability in Distributed Collaboration
10:30	Coffee break
11:00	Paper session 2 (25 min + 5 min questions)
	Siddhartha Bose and Subodh Sohi Enabling Seamless Contextual Collaborations for Mobile Enterprises (presentation slides)
	Manfred Bortenschlager, Gabriele Kotsis and Sigi Reich A Generic Coordination Architecture as an Enabler for Mobile Collaborative Applications (presentation slides)
	Rodger Burmeister, Christoph Pohl, Siegfried Bublitz and Pascale Hugues SNOW - A multimodal approach for mobile maintenance applications (presentation slides)
	Nelio Cacho, Karla Damasceno, Alessandro Garcia, Thais Batista, Frederico Lopes and Carlos Lucena Handling Exceptional Conditions in Mobile Collaborative Applications: An Exploratory Case Study
13:00	Lunch
14:00	Paper session 3 (25 min + 5 min questions)
	Tom Kirkham Providing Location Sensitive e-business Integration for the Small to Medium Enterprise
	Jamie Lawrence, Terry Payne and Dave De Roure Co-presence Communities: Using pervasive computing to support weak social networks (presentation slides)
15:00	End of workshop

Abstract submission:	February 24, 2006
Paper submission:	March 8, 2006 (extended deadline)
Notification:	April 14, 2006
Camera-ready papers:	May 26, 2006
Advance registration discount deadline:	June 2, 2006
Workshop date:	June 27, 2006

Manfred Hauswirth, last updated: $Date: 2006/07/01 19:57:37 $