CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS: Semantic Enterprise Application Integration for Business Processes: Service-Oriented Frameworks

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS - Proposal Submission Deadline: May 15, 2008
Semantic Enterprise Application Integration for Business Processes: Service-Oriented Frameworks
A book edited by Dr. Gregoris Mentzas, Panagiotis Gouvas, Thanassis Bouras
(Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens, Greece) and Dr. Andreas Friesen (SAP Research, Germany)
http://www.imu.iccs.gr/semantic-eai-book/
Introduction
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 (semiautomated)
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.
Objective of the Book
This book aims at providing the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks and base 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.
Target Audience
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.
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

Submission Procedure
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. Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) to:

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Prof. Dr. Gregoris Mentzas
School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
National Technical University of Athens
Iroon Polytechniou 9, Zografou, Athens 15780, Greece
Tel: +30-210-772-3895, Fax: +30-210-772-3550,
e-mail: gmentzas AT mail.ntua.gr
url: http://www.imu.iccs.gr
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