4th International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services (DEECS 2009)

DEECS 2009 -- http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Deecs2009. As part of their e-business activities, enterprises create, share, recombine, and process an ever increasing amount of data and documents that range from simple transactional data to complex business process definitions. In many respective processes, multiple spheres overlap, e.g., (1) inter- with intra-organizational data sources in collaborative processes, (2) master data with transactional data, (3) regular data with behavioral aspects of processes, or (4) facts with normative assertions. Since business entities are members of multiple value chains, same as data sources are often used in multiple contexts and processes, there are often conflicting requirements on the representation of such data. At the same time, enterprise computing infrastructures are currently transforming into service-oriented systems; this change has severe consequences as well as offers opportunities for the data management processes.

All this in combination makes data engineering in e-commerce and service-oriented computing a very challenging task, already at the level of a single company but even more in value chains. Also, respective modeling choices may have long-lasting and far reaching impact, and affect (1) operational efficiency, (2) business process agility, (3) the range of analytical tasks for decision support, and (4) strategic options. Eventually, those choices determine the current and future degree of automation in content and process integration.

While e-business standards in general help, standardization alone does not solve the problem. This is because yielding a consensual representation takes time, consumes resources, and constrains an entity’s ability to capture individual details. Moreover, the cost of implementing and enforcing the standards is sometimes prohibitive for small businesses. Proprietary representations, on the other hand, hamper interoperability, and complicate B2B integration. In service-oriented architectures (SOAs), this complexity is further increased by the behavioral dimension of e-business interactions, e.g., services choreography and orchestration.

This workshop aims at providing a venue for discussion and the exchange of ideas on data and knowledge engineering issues in the dynamic environment of e-business, enterprise computing, and business services and transformation. The relation to CEC’09 is that it addresses a core problem in enterprise computing. In the format of an interactive workshop, it focuses the intersection of three main areas: data engineering, knowledge engineering, and business process management.

Back   17.02.2009.