CIMOSA - News
Editor: Martin Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart, martin.zelm@cimosa.de
The CIMOSA - News is published by the CIMOSA Association.
The CIMOSA News will report on CIMOSA applications, evolution of its technical
specification, advancements in standardisation and related items. Contributions
from other parties are welcome. The CIMOSA - News will be printed periodically
and is also available in the internet at http://www.cimosa.de.
A Network of Excellence (NoE) project INTEROP has been granted within the 6th Framework Programme of the EU. INTEROP intends to support integration of research work in the domain of interoperability and thereby improve the competitiveness of European enterprises, including SME’s, enabling their ability to concretise rapidly networked dynamic organisations. New Technologies for Interoperability within and between enterprises have to emerge to solve the current difficulties encountered to structure and interlink enterprise systems (information, production, decision).
Today, research on interoperability of enterprise applications does not exist as such at the European level. As a result of the IST Thematic Network IDEAS , a roadmap for interoperability research emphasises the need for integrating three key thematic components:
The Joint Programme of Activities aims to
The CE2003 was held in Madeira, Portugal, 2003-07-26/30. The 10th ISPE Conference on Concurrent Engineering was attended by over 350 participants, with a large portion coming from academia of Europe, North America and the Far East. The conference had two major themes: Advanced Design, Production and Management Systems and Enhanced Interoperable Systems. Tracks addressed topics like Complex products development, emerging technologies in the product life cycle, business and virtual project teams in dynamic collaborative networks, human issues with concurrent engineering, agents and multi-agent systems, e-business standards, enterprise architectures and continuous business solutions, products and process models for enterprise integration.
In the plenary sessions global issues were addressed by
keynote speakers from the European Commission, from NIST and from Far East
agencies presenting their view and position on topics like the worldwide
development of e-Business. Business process modelling and enterprise integration
have been addressed in 6 sessions including the two sessions organised
by the CIMOSA Association. Knowledge management, Agent technologies and
Standards for e-business have been other aspects of concurrent engineering
relating to BPM and EI. Standardisation itself was recognised as a valuable
means for effective product development, production, communication, even
research. One problem is that the required consensus building and implementation
of standards is rather slow.
Conference proceedings (2 Volumes, 2556 pages + CD-ROM):
R. Jardim-Goncalves, J. Cha, A. Steiger-Garcao (Eds.) Concurrent Engineering,
A.A. Balkema Publishers, ISBN90 5809 622 X
The Open Application Group (OAG) held a technical meeting in Budapest, Hungary on 2003-09-23/24, (www.openapplications.org/). The meeting was attended by 30 persons from seven countries representing business users, technology vendors, automotive industry associations and system integrators. This workshop titled Best practices and XML Content for eBusiness and Application Integration had the purpose to discuss the latest developments in the extensions of the OAG specifications, to provide a platform for user presentations and to explain the work methodology of OAG working groups.
The Open Application Group, is a not-for-profit industry consortium with many links to industry initiatives focussing on industry standards for both business-to-business (B2B) and Application-to-Application (A2A) Integration. OAG is worldwide active to promote their specification OAGIS, which is supported by large vendor companies like IBM, Oracle and others. Competitive standards are ROSETTA Net and EDIFACT who have developed similar concepts which are also used in many industries.
The major session titles of the workshop were: Facilitating Global Business integration, OAGIS Interoperability with ebXML. Web Services and Industry Initiatives, OAGIS Core Components Update and Workgroup Projects, ODETTE XML Initiatives, Engineering Data and XML (Automotive Product Data Standards Group), ERP/CRM Integration, XML and generic information models and tools. Topics for a potential collaboration with European initiatives could be
The International Journal of IT Standards & Standardization Research (JITSR). This new journal aims to be a platform for presenting and discussing a broad variety of aspects of IT standards research. This includes contributions from the disciplines of computer science, information systems, management, business, social sciences, economics, engineering, political science, public policies, sociology, communication, and human factors/usability. In particular, the journal wants to both support and promote multi-disciplinary research on IT standards.
The journal sets out to advance knowledge of, and insights into, all aspects relating to IT standards and standardisation, by providing publications such as research papers and position papers from academia, public organisations or industry. Some selected publication titles of the first issue are: Block alliances in Formal Standards Setting Environments, IT Standardisation from a European Point of View, Standards in Telecommunication Development, The importance of standards for globally operating businesses. Editor-in-Chief: Kai Jakobs, Technical University of Aachen, Germany .The JITSR is published by the Idea Group Publishing www.idea-group.com/ on a semi-annual basis; the first issue has appeared in November 2002.
The CIMOSA Association (COA) is a non-profit organisation involved in promotion of Enterprise Engineering and Integration based on CIMOSA and its active support in national, European and international standardisation. COA members are industrial and research organisations.