CONFERENCE THEME

    The conference theme of CAiSE'04 is Knowledge and Model Driven Information Systems Engineering for Networked Organisations.
    Modern businesses and IT systems are facing an ever more complex environment characterised by openness, variety, and change.

• Organisations are becoming less self-sufficient and increasingly dependent on business partners and other actors. These trends call for openness of business as well as IT systems, i.e. the ability to connect and interoperate with other systems.

• Organisations are experiencing ever more variety in their business, in all conceivable dimensions. The different competencies required by the workforce are multiplying. In the same way, the variety in technology is overwhelming with a multitude of languages, platforms, devices, standards, and products.

• Organisations need to manage an environment that is constantly changing and where lead times, product life cycles, and partner relationships are shortening. The demand of having to constantly adapt IT to changing technologies and business practices has resulted in the birth of new ideas which may have profound impact on the information systems engineering practices in future years, such as autonomic computing, component and services marketplaces and dynamically generated software.

    These trends pose a number of challenges to both the operational systems and the development processes of the organisation, its work practice, and its IT systems. In order to cope with increasingly complex business and IT environments, organisations need effective instruments for managing their knowledge about these environments.
    Essential among these instruments are models, i.e. representations of aspects of reality including the domain of work, the processes, and the context. Models come in a variety of forms, formal or informal; describing static or dynamic aspects; representing agents, processes, or resources; focusing on business or IT aspects, etc. To realise the full potential of models, there is a need for a business and technology architecture as well as a way of working that place the models firmly in the centre and let them be the driving force in analysis, design, implementation, deployment and use of systems and services. This implies developing not only new modelling languages but also new ways of developing models, which incorporate in a participatory manner all stakeholders involved.

RELEVANT TOPICS

    In addition to the special theme, topics relevant for submissions to CAiSE*04 include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Methodologies, Models, and Tools for IS Development

• Requirements Engineering for IS

• Model Driven Architectures

• Enterprise Modelling Methods and Tools

• Service Oriented and Mobile Computing

• E-government Strategies and Applications

• Knowledge, Information and Data Quality

• Web Content Management and Distribution

• Workflow Systems

• Knowledge Management

• Model and Software Reusability

• Data Warehousing & OLAP

• Metadata and Ontologies

• Support for Co-operative Work

• Innovative Database Technologies

• Distributed, Mobile, and Open Architectures

• Agent-Oriented Technologies

• Languages and Protocols for IS

• Component-Ware and IS

• IS Reengineering

• IS Usability and Interfaces to IS

• Simulation in IS Development

• Semantic Web

Case studies and experience reports related to the above topics are also welcome.