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.

• ICEIMT'04
  
• INTEROP
• Reports from Events
• EE&I Standardisation
• Publication Reviews
  
• Upcoming Events

INTEROP (IST–2003–508011)

The Network of Excellence (NoE) project has been launched on 2004-01-12/14. The 50 partners of INTEROP are composed of 32 universities, 8 research organisations, 8 industrial enterprises and 2 consultancies. The work is devised into the three work areas Integrating Activities, Joint Research and Spreading Excellence and is organised in 14 workpackages. Following the start up of each workpackage, rules have been defined for communication, dissemination, decision making and management across the project, required in a project of this unique size. A common methodology for joint research and an ICT collaboration platform have been specified and plans for dissemination activities have been proposed. Progress can be followed via the site  www.interop-noe.org

Reports from Events

BPM6 sixth Congress on Business Process Management, held in Munich, 2004-03-04/05, was attended by about 90 participants and was focused on BPM applications. A BPM market overview opened the congress and several panel discussions, live tests of BPM solutions and an exhibition of several tool vendors and consultancies complemented the plenary sessions. 9 papers presented case studies, and best practice industry applications as well as trends in BPM products, solutions and technology. Process oriented documentation of SAP R/3 processes in the pharmaceutical industry with three different process types: Material flow oriented, Organisation oriented and SAP R/3 oriented, end-user oriented SAP Front End in a German utility company and the praxis of process portals demonstrated the use of BPM in the industry. Content management vs. BPM and change management lead to concept discussion. A special CD – part of the congress documentation - publishes 90 world-wide BPM applications, mostly from the banking and insurance industry and to a large extend produced by the tool vendors. Further information (in German) can be found at www.NewMediaSales.com .

BITKOM, the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunication and New Media with over 700 member companies is involved via several working groups on industry policies, business administration and technology.
The Working Group Knowledge Engineering & Management (KME) held a workshop out of a series of workshops at ORACLE , Munich, Germany on March 04, 2004 which was attended by 42 participants from Universities, Associations, KM consultants and solution implementers. Three expert groups address the topics, quality and metrics, reference models and profiles and on soft factors, culture and management The workshop topics ‘KM employment through Europe – an empirical survey, by J. Edler, ISI-FhG Karlsruhe, Measuring KM impacts on communication, by H. Angerer, Siemens, a Case study on search engine usability with complex algorithms, by M. Spies University Munich, and Metrics in a knowledge base for skill management by M. Irrgang, Thales, Berlin.Also, the status of the BITKOM Direct project was presented, a knowledge portal with the goal to support the BITKOM member companies, to provide a public dissemination site and a collaboration platform for experts.
A first pilot of BITKOM Direct will be implemented in 4^th Q 2004. Next KME Workshop 2004-05-05 at Bertelsmann, Berlin. For more information (in German) see www.bitkom.org/.

BPM Tools

The FirstSTEP Toolset 5 of Interfacing Technologies composed of the FS Designer, the FS Charter operating on MS-Visio and the Enterprise Process Center (EPC) has been further upgraded: In addition to the available features of the EPC, e.g. business process management capabilities designed for multi-user process modelling and real-time process collaboration in a web based portal, new features have been added in EPC Version 3. Examples are: Role/User based activities and multiple roles for resources /Auto-generated Process Swimlane views by Organisational Units, Roles, Resources / Real-time management of multiple projects at once / Support parallel execution, conditional branching and loop back.

EE&I Standardsation

The JWG 15 of IEC/SC 65A-ISO/TC 184/SC 5 held a meeting at AFNOR, France on 2004-01-14/16, with 12 participants attending. Major work topics and resolutions on the 62264 standard have been: 1) Review of 62264-2, English version completed, introduction to be revised, French version draft available by February 2004. 2) How to generate 62264-3: Is part 3 normative or just informative? Possible sources could be S95 Part 3, Decisional Reference Model (CEN TC 310 WG1), Economic View (SC5 WG1), or PSLX (Production Scheduling Language Consortium). The scope of the standard is focussing on industrial applications, not on services, banking or government. Further, a guidance how to use the standard will be generated. 3) The product definitions defined in TC 184 plenary must be taken into account by referencing the relevant ISO standards. The next JWG15 meeting will take place Bordeaux, France 2004-06-16/18. Contact the convenor Dennis Brandl, dnbrandl @brlconsulting.com

Upcoming Events

• IMS Internationa Forum 2004 - Global Challenges in Manufacturing, Cernobbio, Lake of COMO, Italy, 2004-05-17/19, www.imsforum2004.org/
• ICE 2004, Sevilla, Spain, 2004-06-14/16, www.ice-conference.org/
• CAiSE*04, Riga, Latvia, 2004-06-07/11, www.cs.rtu.lv/caise2004/
• CE2004 Beijing, China, 2004-07-26/30, www.ce2004.org/
• WCC2004, IFIP World Computer Congress, Toulouse, France, 2004-08-22/27, www.wcc2004.org/
• CDVE2004, Palma de Malorca, Spain, 2004-09-19/22 http://dmi.uib.es/people/yuhua/CDVE2004/
• ASIM 2004, Berlin/Germany, 2004-10-04/06, www.asim.fhg.de/ 
• ICEIMT’04, Toronto, Canada, 2004 -10-09-11, www.eil.utoronto.ca/ICEIMT04
• Challenges e-2004, Conference & Exhibition, Vienna, Austria, 2004-10-27/29, www.echallenges.org
  

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.