[ecoop-info] Deadline extension: CFP: ECOOP 07 Workshop Roles'07 - Roles and Relationships in OO Programming, Multiagent systems and Ontologies

[Guido Boella]

The deadline of the workshop has been extended to May 31 2007


Deadline extension

Roles’07

2nd Workshop on Roles and Relationships in
Object Oriented Programming,
Multiagent Systems, and Ontologies

Workshop co-located with ECOOP 2007
Berlin, July 30 and 31, 2007


Roles are a truly ubiquitous notion: like classes, objects, and 
relationships, they pervade the vocabulary of all sciences that deal 
with the nature of things and how these things relate to each other. In 
fact, it seems that roles are so fundamental a notion that they must be 
granted the status of an ontological primitive.

The definition of roles depends on the definition of relationships. With 
the advent of Object Technology, however, relationships have moved out 
of the focus of attention, giving way to the more restricted concept of 
attributes or, more technically, references to other objects. A 
reference is tied to the object holding it and as such is asymmetric—at 
most the target of the reference can be associated with a role. This is 
counter to the intuition that every role should have at least one 
counter-role, namely the one it interacts with. It seems that the 
natural role of roles in object-oriented designs can only be restored by 
installing relationships (collaborations, teams, etc.) as first-class 
programming concepts.

By contrast, the relational nature of roles is already acknowledged in 
the area of Multiagent Systems, since roles are related to the 
interaction among agents and to communication protocols. However, in 
this area there is no convergence on a single definition of roles yet, 
and different points of view, such as agent software engineering, 
specification languages, agent communication, or agent programming 
languages, make different use of roles.
Like its predecessor “Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective” 
(Roles’05) held at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium 
(http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Fall/fs-05-08.php), this 
workshop aims at gathering researchers from different disciplines to 
foster interchange of knowledge and ideas concerning roles and 
relationships, and in particular to converge on ontologically founded 
proposals which can be applied to programming and agent languages.
We invite all researches who have something to contribute to 
participate, by submitting an original paper of up to 8 pages and/or a 
position statement of max 2 pages (both Springer LNCS style). Every 
submission should either propose a new definition of ‘role’ or make a 
clear statement regarding the definition of ‘role’ used.
The first day of the workshop will be devoted to presentations, the 
second one to discussions leading to a “Role Manifesto”. Ideally, if not 
an authoritative definition of the role concept, at least a provisional 
one eliciting the features common to most approaches should emerge from 
this workshop; the process will be continued after the workshop using a 
cooperative website.

Research and mature ideas that focus on the following topics are 
particularly welcome:
•	Roles as first-class constructs in programming, modelling, ontologies, 
and multiagent systems
•	Relationships as first-class programming constructs
•	Applications that would profit from roles and relationships
•	Patterns dealing with the realization of relationships and roles
•	Roles in foundational ontologies and applicative ontologies
•	Roles in models (e.g. UML) and domain-specific languages
•	Roles in multiagent systems design, specification and programming
•	Experience reports with role-oriented approaches
•	Existing and new programming constructs related to roles
•	Literature surveys on roles
•	Reports on roles from other disciplines, like sociology, 
organizational theory, linguistics, etc.

Submissions should be uploaded at http://roles07.di.unito.it/. For more 
information about formatting the paper please consult the Springer LNCS 
web site at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Questions should be sent to Guido Boella (guido [at] di.unito.it).

The papers will be reviewed by at least 2 members of the program 
committee composed of experts in the different areas covered by the 
workshop.

Papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. As in the previous 
edition of this workshop, high quality of submission provided, there may 
be a special issue of some renowned journal containing extended versions 
of the best workshop papers.

Important Dates
• May 31, 2007: Submissions due
• June 7, 2007: Notifications of acceptance
• June 15, 2007: ECOOP Early registration deadline
• July 30-31, 2007: Workshop at ECOOP

Website
http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/roles07

Organizing Committee
Guido Boella - Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita' di Torino 
guido at di.unito.it
Steffen Göbel - SAP Research steffen.goebel at sap.com
Friedrich Steimann - Fernuniversität in Hagen steimann at acm.org
Steffen Zschaler - Technische Universität Dresden 
Steffen.Zschaler at tu-dresden.de

Program Committee
Uwe Assmann, Technische Universität Dresden
Colin Atkinson, Universität Mannheim
Matteo Baldoni, Università di Torino
Giancarlo Guizzardi, LOA-CNR Trento
Stephan Hermann, Technische Universität Berlin
Pierre Kelsen, University of Luxembourg
Claudio Masolo, LOA-CNR Trento
James Odell, Intelligent Automation, inc. Rockville MD
Andrea Omicini, DEIS Università di Bologna
Kasper Østerbye, IT University of Copenhagen
James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington
Daniel Oberle, SAP Research
Elke Pulvermueller, University of Luxembourg
Dirk Riehle, SAP Research, SAP Labs, LLC - Palo Alto, CA
Trygve Reenskaug
Leendert van der Torre, University of Luxembourg
Harko Verhagen, DSV, KTH/SU