Workshop on Object Interoperability (WOI'99)

In association with ECOOP'99
June 14, 1999.
Lisbon, Portugal.

Abstract

Syntactic interoperability is currently well defined and understood at the interface level. However, all parties (vendors and standardization bodies) are starting to recognize that this sort of interoperability is not enough for building applications in Open Systems. The basic problem is that the study of interoperability at the other two levels currently presents serious challenges, from both the theoretical and practical points of view. This workshop focuses mainly on object interoperability at the protocol and semantic levels, in particular on the issues stated on the Call for Papers.

Previous ECOOP workshops have dealt in part with some of these issues (e.g. "Composability Issues in Object-Orientation" -ECOOP'96-, or the WCOP series -dedicated to components in general-), but always in a tangential manner and without facing the whole problem as it stands. Besides, this is a topic of current interest and relevance to the OO community, and a hot issue for international standardization bodies, like ISO and OMG. In fact, RM-ODP is one of the standards that is trying to incorporate semantic interoperability to its model.

This workshop deals not only with component interoperability (at the object interface level), but with all aspects of object interoperability, that can embrace aspects besides and beyond components. Although often confused, components and objects can be really seen as orthogonal concepts, each one having its own specific and distinguishing features. In general, component interoperability can be seen as a particular case of object interoperability.

Position Papers

After the reviewing process, the following position papers have been selected for participating in the workshop:

• "Procotol-safe Workflow Support for Santa Claus",
  by Rick van Rein (Univ. of Twente). [Available also a link to their tool, named Paul].
  
• "Behavioral Mapping for Service Substitutability",
  by Twittie Senivongse (Chulalongkorn Univ.).
  
• "Automatic Selection of Problem Solving Libraries based on Competence Matching",
  by M. Gaspari (Univ. of Bologna), E. Motta (The Open Univ.) and D. Fensel (Univ. of Karlsruhe).
  
• "Semantic and Usage Packaging for Software Components",
  by Jun Han (Monash Univ.).
  
• "Conceptual Design and Development of Applications based on Object Interoperability",
  by J. Gómez (Univ. of Alicante) and O. Pastor (Univ. Pol. Valencia).
  
• "Semantic Trading: Tackling Interoperability Problems during System Integration",
  by S. Terzis and P. Nixon (Univ. of Dublin).
  
• "Improving the Interoperability in Multi-agent Systems",
  by J.M. Corchado and P. Cuesta (Univ. of Vigo).
  
• "Reasoning about Object Clients and Distributed Object Interaction",
  by A. Mikhajlova (Turku Centre, Åbo Akademi Univ.).
  
• "Extending IDLs with pi-calculus for Protocol Compatibility",
  by C. Canal, L. Fuentes and A. Vallecillo (Univ. of Málaga).

Workshop Organizers