Seventh OOPSLA Workshop on 
Behavioral Semantics of 
OO Business and System Specifications

in conjunction with
The Thirteenth Annual ACM Conference
on Object-Oriented Programming Systems,
Languages and Applications

Monday 19th October 1998


The contents and the preface of the proceedings.
The workshop proceedings where printed as technical report by the Technische Universität München. But we ran out of copies.
 


Call for Papers:

Workshop themes:

Business and system specifications are technical documents used to describe and understand businesses and specifically business rules and the computer systems that have to support (some of) these rules. Specifications have to express this understanding in a clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to act as common ground between business domain experts, analysts and software developers. They also provide the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs ("patterns") common to all, or a large number of, businesses, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. They introduce precision much earlier than in coding, so that business people -- and not the developers -- define all business rules. Adequate specification approaches substantially ease the elicitation of business requirements during walkthroughs with business customers, and support clear separation of concerns known since Adam Smith as division of labor. Different audiences are interested in different aspects of "common business components", and correspondingly may want to buy or sell these components based on different criteria.

Precise specification of semantics -- as opposed to just signatures -- is essential not only for business specifications, but also for business designs and system specifications. In particular, it is needed for appropriate handling of viewpoints which are essential for understanding large and even moderately sized systems, both business and computer ones. (800-page "flat" specifications are neiter used nor read by anyone.) In order to handle the complexity of a (new or existing) large system, it must be considered, on the one hand, as a composition of separate viewpoints, and on the other hand, as an integrated whole, probably at different abstraction levels.

Many concepts and constructs used for all kinds of behavioral specifications -- from business to systems -- have common semantics and thus are good candidates for standardization and industry-wide usage. Various international standardization activities (such as the ISO Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing, OMG activities around the semantics of UML and other OMG submissions, (common) business objects, as well as the OMG semantics working group) are at different stages of addressing these issues.

It is therefore the aim of the workshop to bring together theoreticians and practitioners to report their experience with making semantics precise (perhaps even formal), clear, concise and explicit in OO business specifications, business designs, and system specifications. Both academic (teaching!) and industrial "war stories" will be particularly appreciated. Experience in the usage of various (object-oriented) modeling approaches for these purposes would be of special interest, as would experience in explicit traceability of semantics between a business specification, business design, and a system specification.


Topics ...

include, but are not limited to: ?

Organizers

Haim Kilov

Merrill Lynch
Operations, Services and Technology
World Financial Center
South Tower
New York
NY 10080-6105, USA
Bernhard Rumpe

Institut für Informatik,
Technische Universität München
80333 Munich, Germany
Ian Simmonds

IBM T J Watson Research Center
30 Saw Mill River Road
Hawthorne
NY 10532, USA



Important Dates

    Deadline for submission:    August     1, 1998
    Notification of acceptance: August    20, 1998
    Final version:              September 10, 1998
    Day of workshop:            October   19, 1998
Please note that workshop participants must register at least on that day at OOPSLA conference. Early registration discount is available until August 30, 1998. We will have an overhead projector, and a flipchart available. Unfortunately nothing else.

Please note that the deadline for the final version is hard.


Proceedings

will be printed as technical report of the Munich University of Technology and will be available at the conference. Please note the submission guidelines. We are planning to produce a book with revised versions of the best papers of this and previous workshops.


This web site

is http://www.se-rwth.de/~rumpe/publications/oopsla98-ws/ and will contain all information about the workshop. You may also contact the organizers.


Submissions

should be about 5-10 pages and highlight the main contributions of the author(s). Interesting papers will be selected by the organizers and their authors will have the possibility to give a 20 minute presentation of them at the workshop. Furthermore, each author is encouraged to present open questions and one or two main statements that shall be discussed at the workshop.
Submissions should be sent by email in Postscript (or if necessary Lotus WordPro, RTF or Word) format to Ian Simmonds.


Related information


10-6-98