Tutorials, posters, panels and industrial contributions at the 26th international conference on Conceptual modeling - Volume 83
John Grundy, Sven Hartmann, Alberto H. F. Laender, Leszek A. Maciaszek, John F. Roddick · 2007
The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) series is an annual forum for exploring research, development, novel applications and industrial innovations in the area of conceptual modelling. The 26th edition of this conference (ER 2007) was held in Auckland, New Zealand from November 5 to 9, 2007. This volume contains the tutorials, panels, posters and software demonstrations that were presented at ER 2007. On behalf of the programme committee we commend these papers to you and hope you find them useful. Conceptual modelling is fundamental to the development of complex systems, because it provides the key means of communication between systems developers, end-users and customers. Conceptual modelling provides languages, methods and tools to understand and represent the application domain; to elicit, conceptualise and formalise system requirements and user needs; to communicate systems designs to all stake-holders; to formally verify and validate system designs at a high level of abstraction; and to minimise ambiguities in system development. Initially, conceptual modeling mainly addressed data-intensive information systems and contributed to data modelling and database application engineering. The area of conceptual modeling has now matured to encompass all kinds of application areas such as e-applications (including e-business and e-learning), web-based systems (including the semantic web and ubiquitous systems), life sciences and geographic applications. High-quality tutorials are a long-standing tradition of the ER conferences. They complement the depth-oriented accepted paper sessions and keynote talks by providing conference participants with broad overviews of emerging fields or clear syntheses of results in existing fields. For ER 2007, we invited Olga De Troyer, Frederic Kleinermann, Bram Pellens, and Wesley Bille (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Martin Doerr, Christian-Emil Ore, and Stephen Stead (FORTH), Dirk Langemann (University of Lubeck), Sebastian Link and Thu Trinh (Massey University), Leszek A. Maciaszek (Macquarie University), and Leon Sterling and Kuldar Taveter (University of Melbourne) to present tutorials on specific areas of their expertise in conceptual modelling. We are grateful to the invited tutorial speakers for their illuminating presentations and their patience in answering questions from the interested audience. A major objective of the ER conferences is to identify new issues and directions in conceptual modelling, to share experiences, to host discussions, and to initiate future work and collaborations. Panels, poster sessions, software demonstrations and industrial contributions are an important part of the ER conferences helping to make them an inspiring experience for all participants. We are grateful to Heinrich C. Mayr (University of Klagenfurth) for moderating the ER 2007 panel discussion on What You Always Wanted To Know About Modelling But Were Afraid To Ask or: Which Are The Genuine Advances In Modelling?. Poster sessions and software demonstrations provided the opportunity to report on projects in progress, to demonstrate alpha- and beta-versions of not-for-profit software tools and products, and to promote cooperations on new project ideas. All submitted posters and software demonstrations were carefully reviewed by three international experts, and the best 27 were then selected for inclusion into the programme. We would like to thank all authors of submissions as well as the members of the programme committees of the main ER conference and its associated Conceptual Modelling for Life Sciences Applications (CMLSA) workshop for their timely expertise in carefully reviewing the submissions.