June, 16-17, 2008, Montpellier, France

In conjunction with the CAiSE’08 conference

Modern enterprises face a strong economical pressure to increase competitiveness, to operate on a global market, and to engage in alliances of several kinds. Agility thus has become the new guiding principle for enterprises. This requires flexible organizational structures and business processes, as well as flexible supporting information systems and a flexible ICT-infrastructure. In addition, an enterprise needs to be able to easily expand or shrink, be it through cooperation with other enterprises, through mergers or acquisitions, or through insourcing or outsourcing of services.

In order to meet these economical requirements, enterprises rely increasingly on the benefits of modern information and communication technology (ICT). However, the appropriate knowledge to deploy this technology as needed, and in an effective and efficient way, is largely lacking, particularly knowledge regarding the cooperation in and between enterprises and knowledge regarding the interoperability of their information systems.

The focus of the CIAO! 2008 workshop is the application of the notions of architecture and ontology in dealing with inter- and intra-organizational cooperation and the interoperability of supporting information systems.

The CIAO! 2008 workshop is the 4th workshop of a series of successful workshops.