Christoph Bussler Knihy

st The 1 Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise (BIRTE nd 2006) was held on September 11, 2006 in conjunction with the 32 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2006) in Seoul, Korea. The - location with VLDB is very important as the topic of the workshop was centered on different aspects in the lifecycle of business intelligence on very large enterprise-wide operational real-time data sets. In today’s competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to und- stand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is not longer adequate; users now - mand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time business data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high-quality information.

Focusing on a comprehensive understanding of business-to-business (B2B) integration, the book provides a clear technical definition and explores its connections to related concepts like A2A and B2C. Christoph Bussler presents a structured B2B integration architecture rooted in a coherent conceptual model. He emphasizes that effective B2B integration entails not only the exchange of business events among trading partners but also the integration of back-end applications within business processes, surpassing conventional enterprise application integration methods.

The book explores Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the Semantic Web, emphasizing the need for automated processes to enhance the web's potential beyond mere browsing. It discusses the integration of ontologies, metadata, and advanced computing infrastructures, highlighting the multi-disciplinary efforts required for implementation. The text argues that the Semantic Web can significantly aid clinical information discovery, benefiting scientific communities that rely on diverse, fragmented knowledge resources. The importance of trust, security, and expressivity in these fields is also addressed.

The 6th Workshop on Technologies for E-Services (TES-05) was held September 2-3, 2005, in conjunction with the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2005) in Trondheim, Norway. The next generation of applications will be developed in the form of services that are offered over a network, either a company's intranet or the Internet. Service-based architectures depend on an infrastructure that allows service providers to describe and advertise their services and service consumers to discover and select the services that best fulfill their requirements. Frameworks and messaging protocols for e-services in stationary and mobile environments are being developed and standardized, metadata and ontologies are being defined, and mechanisms are under development for service composition, delivery, monitoring, and payment. End-to-end security and quality of service guarantees will be essential for the acceptance of e-services. As e-services become pervasive, e-service management will play a central role. The workshop's objective is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to present new developments and experience reports. The goal of the TES workshop is to identify the technical issues, models, and infrastructures that enable enterprises to provide e-services to other businesses and individual customers. In response to the call for submissions, 40 papers were submitted, out of which the Program Committee selected 10 high-quality submissions for presentation at the wo- shop. Unfortunately, one author had to withdraw, and the remaining nine papers that were presented are included in these proceedings.

Six parallel Business Process Management workshops took place on September 5th, 2005, during the Third International Conference on Business Process Management in Nancy, France. This marked the inaugural inclusion of workshops in the BPM conference, and the program proved to be highly successful. The workshops covered a variety of topics, from fundamental process modeling to the emerging fields of Web service choreography and orchestration, highlighted in the “Workshop on Business Processes and Services” and the “Workshop on Web Service Choreography and Orchestration.” These areas bridge business process management and Web services research. Another key focus was on business process design and business process intelligence, crucial for supporting business process reengineering to achieve superior designs. The workshop on “Enterprise and Networked Enterprises Interoperability” sparked extensive discussions on business process interoperability. Lastly, the “Business Process Reference Models” workshop aimed to explore different perspectives on reference models to establish a common understanding of terminology. We extend our gratitude to the workshop organizers for their efforts in preparation, review process organization, and onsite management, as well as their collaboration in the post-publication process.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort, with preliminary data analysis previously shared. Current experiments focus on subjects engaging in online group learning through communication media like email and threaded discussions. While we could have explored the impact of mobile devices by using different hardware such as personal computers or mobile phones, our findings aim to shed light on the challenges mobile learners face in group problem-solving. The analysis will provide baseline information on whether traits of successful or unsuccessful online groups apply to mobile learners. We anticipate that SMS will serve as a more effective medium for instant communication, as mobile phones can remind users of incoming messages and users are likely to be interrupted by notifications. However, further investigation is required to address other issues that impede optimal online group work. For instance, the 'accuracy of transferred information' emerged as a significant concern with email as a communication medium. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or SMS are generally better suited for conveying shorter messages compared to traditional emails, indicating a need for tailored communication strategies in mobile learning contexts.

The 11th Conference “Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications – Semantic Web Challenges” (AIMSA 2004) continued successfully pursuing the main aim of the AIMSA series of conferences – to foster the multidisciplinary community of artificial intelligence researchers, embracing both the theoretic underpinnings of the field and the practical issues involved in development, deployment, and maintenance of systems with intelligent behavior. Since the first conference in 1984 AIMSA has provided an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world and it is even more important nowadays in the uni- ing Europe. The current AIMSA edition is focused on Semantic Web methods and technologies. The Internet is changing the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost every domain of our life. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application framework. The emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artefacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. One hundred and seventy-six interesting papers were submitted to the conference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in May 2004. The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology engineering, ontology matching and mapping, ontology-based querying, ontology merging and population, infrastructure, semantic web services, service discovery and composition, data from the semantic web, knowledge presentation, applications, content management, and information management and integration.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2002, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2002 in conjunction with CAiSE 2002. The 18 revised full papers presented together with two keynote papers were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on web services, e-business, and e-services and the semantic web.