The workshop was held at NIST, in Gaithersburg, on 2002-02-06/08, with an attendance of 24 people coming from Canada (1), Germany (1), Mexico (1), UK (1), USA (20 - some only part time).

This workshop was the third one of a series of four, held on issues in enterprise inter- and intraorganization integration with the aim to increase international consensus in both academia and industry. Attended by experts on agent technologies, ontologies, systems engineering, virtual enterprise and business
process modelling, the intentions were to achieve some level of consensus regarding drivers, barriers and enablers for knowledge exchange across organisational boundaries. The workshop had the following objectives:

• Identify requirements for interoperability (for both business processes and enterprise models) in inter-and intra-organizational applications
• Review and assess available technologies
• Identify missing parts of technologies

WG1: The working group focused on the integration of product, process and enterprise life cycles based on building-block system engineering concepts. The focus was on how to interoperate across life cycle phases and between and among the different processes in the enterprise with emphasis on product development and production processes development. Such interoperability will allow use of concurrent product and production process data for product and process design optimisation, electronic prototyping and operational decision support. Some criteria for the quality of interoperability as well as areas of future research
have been identified.

WG2: Workgroup 2 focused on the barriers of EI and examined the new leverage that ontologies might provide. A consensus was reached that such an approach could overcome the most severe of these barriers. Some detailed descriptions of test projects were created. The first one may continue as a logical extension
of the group's discussion. This addressed the reusability and "tweaking" of model components.

WG1 and WG2 discussed in a joint session the information objects mismatch issue between “verbs” and “nouns”. Agreement reached that WG2 must assess the broad needs of WG1 holistic integration framework before demonstrating a small pilot production application to test the reusability of what they develop. It was suggested that we need a generalized method for mapping business application levels to software information systems levels.

The reports will be presented and published at the ICEIMT’02 at Valencia, Spain, 2002-04-24/26.

List of papers presented in the workshop plenary:

1. Challenges to Multi-Enterprise Integration: the EECOMS Experience, Bei-Tseng Chu, Univ. of North Carolina, USA
2. Trends in Industry and Standardisation, Em delaHostria, Rockwell Automation, USA
3. MultiView: Data Standards for the Integrated Digital Environment, Richard Engwall, RLEngwall & Associates, USA
4. ICEIMT History, Ted Goranson, Sirius-Beta, USA
5. ALP (Advanced Logic Project) and the UltraLog Program, Mark Greaves, DARPA, USA
6. Process Specification Language and Interoperability, Michael Gruninger, NIST, USA
7. Interoperability Concerns, Al Jones, NIST, USA
8. A Framework and Tool for Inter-Organizational Computing, Myong Kang, Mitretek Systems, USA
9. OAGI B2B Testing Initiatives, Boonserm Kulvatunyou, NIST, USA
10. Agentpro and Points of View on Ontologies, Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu, USA
11. Method to make the Business Users to understand and develop the Ownership of the Process Contents, Juan Carlos Mendez, Mexico
12. Ontologies for Semantically Interoperable B2B E-Commerce, Leo Obrst, MITRE, USA
13. Process Composition: Quality of Service Specification, Semantics and Specification, Amit Sheth, Univ. of Georgia, USA
14. Issues in applying Constructs to Process Interoperability - work in progress, David Shorter, IT Focus, UK
15. Improving PDM Systems Integration Using Software Agents, Weiming Shen, NRC, Canada
 
 

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