Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages (CoALa2004)

[Zoran Milosevic <zoran@dstc.edu.au>]

Dear Colleagues,

Just to draw your attention to the following all-day workshop to be run in
conjunction with the IEEE EDOC2004 conference. It would be good if we have a
paper/presentation summarising current status of our standardisation work.
This is one of the topics of relevance for the workshop. Maybe we can
discuss this on next teleconference.

Best Regards,
zoran



Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages (CoALa2004)
        In conjunction with EDOC2004 Conference,
          Monterey (CA), September 21, 2004
           www.edocconference.org/coala2004

                  Call for Papers


ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
The cross-organisational and collaborative nature of business today
increasingly requires that organisations have more transparent view of data,
information and processes of their partners.  This implies the need for an
almost instant access to and a more reliable and accurate view of the
business contract data, including both static contract definitions and
real-time contract execution. It is surprising that contracts are still
treated mostly as legal documents disconnected from other enterprise systems
in spite of the fact that they are a central mechanism for defining
interactions and policy framework for cross-organisational collaborations.
Although contracts are a key governance mechanism for business
collaborations there is currently inadequate e-business support for using
contract information to manage cross-organisational collaborations. In
addition, current support for the management of contracts themselves (if it
exists) has an 'inward' focus, namely on internal enterprise data and
processes. The requirements of the extended enterprise, which includes
collaborative arrangements between a company and its trading partners,
increasingly demand a more 'outward' perspective on enterprise contract
management.

The importance of contracts as a governing mechanism for any extended
enterprise and the capabilities of new technologies such as Web Services
require new and better understanding of contracts from EDOC perspective.
This workshop will provide opportunity for the participants to exchange
ideas about the enterprise contracts, their role in enterprise systems and
propose new solutions to these important EDOC problems.

SCOPE
This Workshop will provide a collaborative forum for the participants to
exchange recent or preliminary results, to conduct intensive discussions on
a particular topic, or to coordinate efforts between representatives of a
technical community in the area of Contract Architectures and Languages. The
program committee seeks papers and proposals that address various aspects of
contracts, including enterprise modeling, e-business, formal and legal
aspects with the aim of providing a balanced mix of presentations from these
different perspectives. This workshop will be held on the 21st of September
2004.

TOPICS
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Enterprise contract architectures
- Contract as a basis for coordination of cross-organisational interactions
- Contracts from system theoretic point of view
- Formalisms for expressing contracts
- Contract description languages
- Contract negotiation, validation
- Run-time contract monitoring and enforcement
- Standardisation activities for e-contracts (e.g. legalXML OASIS and
UN/CEFACT) - status and directions
- The use of model-driven techniques and tools
- Legal issues associated with electronic contracts
- Tools for drafting and constructing contracts
- Integration of contract management systems with other enterprise systems,
e.g. payment systems, accounting systems and ERP systems
- Contract management requirements for specific contracts such as Service
Level Agreements (SLAs), Construction contracts, financial contracts,
e-government contracts etc
- Trust and contract management issues
- Use and applicability of existing standards/initiatives (e.g. XML, Web
Services, BPEL4WS, WS-CDL, RuleML etc)
- Links between contracts and business processes
- Practical experience with contract management systems

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Papers must not exceed 8 pages using the IEEE Computer Society Format. Each
paper should include a 200 word abstract, a list of keywords and authors'
e-mail addresses on separate page. Authors should submit papers by email in
PDF format to coala-org@dstc.edu.au). All papers will be formally reviewed.
Workshop proceedings will be published on the conference CD-ROM and all
accepted papers will appear in the IEEE Digital Library. The best papers
will be considered for publication in a special issue of a related computer
science journal. At least one author of an accepted paper should participate
in the Workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop papers due:    June 24, 2004 (Strict Deadline)
Author notification:    July 12, 2004
Final papers due:       August 12, 2004
Workshop date:          September 21, 2004


WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
Zoran Milosevic (DSTC, Australia)
Guido Governatori (Queensland University, Australia)

WORKSHOP PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Jason Harrop (SpeedLegal Pty Ltd, Australia)
- Dan Greenwood (MIT, USA)
- Jishnu Mukherji (Hewlett-Packard, USA)
- Marek Sergot (Imperial College, UK)
- Heiko Ludwig (IBM TJ Watson, USA)
- Dave Marvit (Fujitsu Laboratories, USA)
- Gerald  Quirchmayr (University of Vienna, Austria)
- Martin Schader (University of Mannheim, Germany)
- Greg Meredith (Microsoft, USA)
- Boualem Benatallah (UNSW, Australia)
- Peter Linington (Kent University, UK)
- Babak Sadighi (SICS, Sweden)
- Bill McCarthy (Michigan State University, USA)
- Ron Lee (Florida International University, USA)
- Mike Papazoglou (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)

A PDF version of this CFP is available at:

www.edocconference.org/coala2004/CoALa2004-CFP.pdf