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Asunto: ECOOP'2000 Workshop on Object Interoperability
Fecha: Tue Feb 8 08:45:20 2000
De: Antonio Vallecillo <av@lcc.uma.es>

 

  2nd. International Workshop on Object Interoperability (WOI'00)
                       In Association with ECOOP'2000 
                    Sophia Antipolis, 12 or 13 June 2000
                    (http://webepcc.unex.es/juan/woi00/)


Call for Participation

Interoperability is one of the key aspects related to the construction of
large object-oriented systems, and can be defined as the ability of two or
more entities to communicate and cooperate despite differences in the
implementation language, the execution environment or the model abstraction. 

At ECOOP'99, the first International workshop Object Interoperability
(WOI'99) successfully contributed to gather a number of researchers
interested in object interoperability, allowing them to start building a
common understanding of the different problems and yet unexplored areas to
be investigated in this field. At WOI'99, it was accepted that three main
levels of interoperability between objects can be distinguished: the
signature level (names and signatures of operations), the protocol level
(partial ordering between exchanged messages and blocking conditions), and
the semantic level ("meaning" of
operations). 

Interoperability at the signature level is now well defined and understood,
and currently middleware architects and vendors are trying to establish
different interoperational standards at this level (e.g. CORBA, JavaBeans
or DCOM) and bridges among them. Nevertheless, all parties are starting to
recognize that this sort of interoperability is not sufficient for ensuring
the correct development of applications in open systems. Typical interface
definition languages (IDLs) provide just the syntactic descriptions of the
objects' public methods, i.e. their signatures. However, nothing is said
about the ordering in which the objects expect their method to be called,
their blocking conditions, or their real functionality. Basically, current
IDLs do not describe the usage, capabilities and behaviour of objects. 

The variety of topics covered during WOI'99 revealed the wide range of
challenges and issues that the study of object interoperability at both
protocol and semantic levels brings out when objects have to interoperate
in open and independently extensible systems. At WOI'00 we intend to
discuss some of those questions, review the progress made so far in these
two levels, and explore new ideas that help addressing object
interoperability issues in open systems. As a WOI'00 new feature, we want
to pay special attention to some of the commercial object models (CORBA,
COM, ...), studying how to extend their IDLs in order to cope with some of
those interoperability issues, and how to check them during compilation and
run time in real commercial applications. In particular, topics of interest
include, but are not limited to: 

- Extensions to object interfaces and IDLs to deal with protocol or
semantic interoperability (specially commercial object IDLs).
- Enabling models, technologies and architectures for object interoperability. 
- Mediated architectures and automated construction of mediators. 
- Using coordination to achieve interoperability. 
- Resource discovery based on semantic matching. 
- Protocol and semantic checking techniques. 
- Interoperability of agents. 
- Industrial and experience reports. 

WOI'00 tries to provide a venue where researchers and practitioners on
these topics can meet, disseminate and exchange ideas and problems,
identify some of the key issues related to object interoperability, and
explore together possible solutions. 

To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited to
20 participants and submission of a position paper is required. All
selected papers will be made available to participants prior to the
workshop to improve the productivity.

Submission Format and Procedure

Position statements should be 4 to 8 A4 pages long in LNCS format and
include the author's name, affiliation and contact details. They should be
submited by e-mail as postscript or PDF files before March 24, 2000, to
Antonio Vallecillo (av@lcc.uma.es). All papers will be formally reviewed by
at least two referees, and selected papers will be published in the
workshop proceedings. Besides, extended abstracts of presented papers at
the workshop may be published by Springer-Verlag as part of the ECOOP'00
Workshop Reader, if it gets produced. Authors will be notified of
acceptance by April 10, 2000. At least one author of accepted papers should
participate in the workshop. 

Important Dates

     Paper submission: March 24, 2000. 
     Notification of acceptance: April 10, 2000. 
     Workshop handouts ready: May 7, 2000. 

Workshop Organizers

    Antonio Vallecillo, Málaga University (av@lcc.uma.es)
    Juan Hernandez, University of Extremadura (juanher@unex.es)
    Jose M. Troya, Málaga University  (troya@lcc.uma.es)    






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