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

The CIAO! workshop is a leading workshop in the emerging field of Enterprise Engineering, which is based on the notions of Enterprise Ontology and Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Ontology is conceptually defined as (the understanding of) the essence of an enterprise. Operationally, it is its highest-level constructional model, completely independent on the way in which it is implemented. Enterprise Architecture is conceptually defined as the normative restriction of design freedom. Operationally, it is the set of design principles that are applicable to the (re)design of the enterprise’s business processes, organization, information systems, etc.

The goal of the workshop is to gather academics and practitioners in order to share innovative research issues and practical experiences, and to facilitate profound discussions about these issues, in particular about the application of the notions of architecture and ontology in dealing with inter- and intra-organizational cooperation and the interoperability of supporting information systems.

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling cross-enterprise business processes
• Reference models for cross-enterprise business processes
• Cooperation theories (e.g., the language-action-perspective)
• Domain reference ontologies
• Enterprise ontologies
• Enterprise architectures
• Business rules
• Information system ontologies
• Information system architectures
• Component-based system development
• Ontology-based web services
• Interoperability testing and verification
• Inter- and intra-enterprise information systems

We are looking for articles on current or recently finished research projects as well as articles from practitioners. Based on our inspiring experience of the 2004, 2005 and 2006 workshops, the CIAO! 2008 workshop is planned again to be a real workshop, providing ample time for discussions and group works, during two days. Consequently, the paper presentations will be short, covering only the highlights. In addition, the focus of discussion will be on CIAO: the problems areas Cooperation and Interoperability, and the application of Architecture and Ontology in dealing with them.

Publication

The CIAO! workshop proceedings will be published in the Springer LNBIP series “Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing”.

Submission Conditions

Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions must conform to Springer’s LNBIP format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Submissions not conforming to the LNBIP format or exceeding 15 pages will be rejected without review. Information about the Springer LNBIP format can be found at Springer LNBIP Web page . Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract.

Abstract submission	extended to March 7 (instead of February 15)
Paper submission	extended to March 7 (instead of February 22)
Acceptance notification	extended to March 27 (instead of March 21)
Camera ready	April 01
CIAO! workshop	June 16-17, 2008
CAiSE conference	June 16-20, 2008

Antonia Albani (a.albani@tudelft.nl)

Chair of Information Systems Design

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Jan L.G. Dietz (j.l.g.dietz@tudelft.nl)

Chair of Information Systems Design

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Wil van der Aalst	Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Bernhard Bauer	University of Augsburg, Germany
Emmanuel delaHostria	Rockwell Automation, USA
Johann Eder	University of Vienna, Austria
Joaquim Filipe	School of Technology of Setúbal, Portugal
Rony G. Flatscher	Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria
Kees van Hee	Eindhoven University, The Netherlands
Birgit Hofreiter	University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Jan Hoogervorst	Sogeti Netherlands, The Netherlands
Christian Huemer	Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Zahir Irani	Brunel University, UK
Peter Loos	University of Saarland, Germany
Graham Mcleod	University of Kaapstad, South Africa
Arturo Molina	CSIM-ITESM, Mexico
Aldo de Moor	CommunitySense, The Netherlands
Hans Mulder	University of Antwerp, Belgium
Moira Norrie	ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Andreas L. Opdahl	University of Bergen, Norway
Maria Orlowska	Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Poland
Martin Op ‘t Land	Capgemini, The Netherlands
Erik Proper	Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Gil Regev	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Dewald Roode	University of Pretoria, South Africa
Pnina Soffer	MIS department, Haifa University, Israel
José Tribolet	INESC and University of Lisbon, Portugal
Johannes Maria Zaha	University of Duisburg Essen, Germany