[ecoop-info] Semantic EAI book: Call for Chapter Proposals

[Grigoris Mentzas]

[apologies for cross-postings]

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CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Proposal Submission Deadline: May 15, 2008 
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Semantic Enterprise Application Integration for Business Processes:
Service-Oriented Frameworks

http://www.imu.iccs.gr/semantic-eai-book

A book to be published by IGI Global (USA)

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INTRODUCTION
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The goal of Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) is to integrate and
streamline heterogeneous business processes across different applications
and business units, and to facilitate employees, decision makers and
business partners to readily access corporate and customer data no matter
where it resides. This business process fusion requires the transformation
of business activities that could be achieved by the integration of the
interfaces of previously autonomous business processes by pipelining
different middleware technologies and enabling the effective
(semi-automated) exchange of information between various systems within a
company or across enterprises. 

Although current EAI trends and technologies, like Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Web Services
technologies, are quite mature, if we try to increase the level of
automation in integration scenarios, we confront several problems and
challenges, such as a) data and message level heterogeneities between
interoperating services, b) insufficient search and discovery of published
Web Services in a common registry, and c) inadequate Web Process composition
with regard to the desired functionality and the operational requirements. 

The problem that still exists, which the traditional, syntactic EAI
technologies are weak to solve, refers to the formalization and the
documentation of the semantics related to the interfaces and the data
structures of the deployed Web Services. This lack of formal semantics of
applications and services to be integrated makes it difficult for software
engineers and developers to interconnect heterogeneous applications and thus
creates obstacles in the automating EAI activities. There is no doubt that
these needs impose the use and interpretation of semantics in EAI and that
semantically enriched approaches will hopefully mitigate these problems.

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OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK
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This book aims at providing the latest research findings such as theoretical
foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks
and case studies for the design and development of Semantic Enterprise
Application Integration based on Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services
Technologies, Service-Oriented Architectures and Collaborative Business
Processes.

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TARGET AUDIENCE 
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The principal audience will consist of scholars and researchers in the
fields of EAI, semantic web technologies, interoperability and semantic
integration. The book aims to provide "food for thought" for future
research. However, it also aims to address the needs of practitioners
working on complex supply-chain environments, who may find within the book
the foundations for new ideas in the EAI field. Graduate and post-graduate
students would also find this book to be a useful reference resource.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST 
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Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Enterprise Data Semantic Interoperability
    * Semantic Interoperability in heterogeneous information systems
    * Resolving conflicts and incompatibilities in data semantics
    * Data ontologies, structures and schemas for enterprise application
integration

Semantically-enriched Business Process Management and Collaboration
    * Semantic approaches for process composition in business collaboration
    * Semantically-enriched service matching in business collaboration
    * Architectures and infrastructures for collaborative business processes
    * Choreography and orchestration in collaborative business processes
    * Collaborative business processes in service oriented computing
environments

Dynamic Business Process Composition and Orchestration
    * Discovery- and matchmaking- based dynamic composition
    * Dynamic service selection and binding 
    * Business process modeling based on functional, non-functional, and
process semantics
    * Business process orchestration based on complex behavioral process
descriptions

Semantic EAI Use Cases
    * Business case-studies: business ecosystems, value-added networks
    * Intra- and Inter- Organizational Use Cases: Manufacturing,
Construction, Logistics, Health Care, Pharmaceutical industry,
Bio-technology, Tourism, Services, etc. 
    * Deployment, Performance Evaluation and Validation of Semantic EAI
Solutions

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SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
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Prospective authors are invited to submit via e-mail on or before May 15,
2008, a 2-5 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission, scope
of contents, and organization of the proposed chapter. 

Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by May 31, 2008, about the
status of their proposals and will be provided with guidelines for writing
their full chapters. 

Full chapters are expected to be submitted by August 31, 2008. All submitted
chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. 

The book is scheduled to be published in 2009 by IGI Global,
www.igi-global.com, publisher of the Information Science Reference (formerly
Idea Group Reference) and Medical Information Science Reference imprints.
For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit
www.igi-global.com. 

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BOOK EDITORS
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Book edited by:

Gregoris Mentzas, Panagiotis Gouvas, Thanassis Bouras (Institute of
Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens,
Greece) and Andreas Friesen (SAP Research, Karlsruhe, Germany)


Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document)
to:
Gregoris Mentzas (gmentzas at mail.ntua.gr)

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