ICEIS

Jorge Cardoso (SAP Research @ Dressden) presented their efforts on Thetsus/Texo. They are using the SOA paradigm as a way to reengineer business processes, pushing the good’old functional design decomposition to the next level. The building stone of their work is the ISE methodology that proposes to streamline as follows. Innovation Requirements Design Implementation Preparation to market Market lunch The interesting twist of the methodology is that it also tries to treat each of these steps as services, raising again the buzz word of the conferences “business services”. ...

My second afternoon session was formed by paper 506, 553, and 582. Machine learning was the pervasive fabric for this session. From bayesian network modeling for network intrusion detection and machine learning for process mining, to music information retrieval and similarity measures. All of them were interesting on their own, but I would like to write down some of the thoughts about paper 553. The paper focussed on process mining. Basically from a log of a process they reconstructed the events and graph and tried to induce the business rules governing the process. They authors took a divide and conquer approach to simplify the modeling inside smaller regions of the problem—very similar to the GALE approach back in 1999, or the mixed decision trees paper. After the talk was over I kept wondering where is the connection between process mining and provenance mining—provenance can be defined as the execution history of computer processes which were utilized to compute a final piece of data. Quite an intriguing thought. ...

I attended four papers (you can check the abstracts of Friday papers here): paper 304, 323, 538, and 434. On of the paper has nobody to present it. There were quite a bunch of interesting ideas. I just want to mention one of them. Two papers presented several methodologies to model SOA. Another interesting approach was the claim (papers 304 and 434) that SOA can be used for modeling business processes, and have little to do with information technologies. They claimed that such a connection to information technologies should be done once the SOA business processes are well defined. This may sound quite estrange if you are coming from a technical background. However, it is not far fetch. It just sound like a reincarnation of the late nineties hype on business reengineering via functional designs—which SAP rided so successful. Interestingly Jorge Cardoso also hinted this direction during the morning panel. ...

The hotel finally got the wireless system rebooted, so I am finally back up. I found quite unusual to open the ICEIS 2008 conference with a panel form by the four invited speakers: Moira Norrie (Global Information System Group, ETH), Jorge Cardoso (SAP), Jean-Marie Favre (UFR, IMA), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research Barcelona). Each of them did a short introduction of their invited talks, and just three questions were asked. Since the conference started at 11am, after the panel, lunch break :D ...