Won Meritorious Award at the CONISAR 2008 Conference

On November 8, 2008 paper titled "Computing Professional Association Membership: An Exploration of Membership Needs and Motivations" won Meritorious Award at the CONISAR 2008 Conference.

The first annual Conference on Information Systems Applied Research (CONISAR) 2008 in Phoenix, Arizona. CONISAR conference is sponsored by the Education Special Interest Group of Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP). CONSIAR conference focuses on research dealing with real-world practical applications of information sciences, systems, and technology, and provides a valuable forum for both researchers and practitioners. Topics include IS applications, ethics, technological changes, emerging applications, and IS research.

For more about CONISAR: http://conisar.org/

As per conference organizers, Award winning papers selection went through 3 rounds of review involving total of 12 reviewers.

There were three Meritorious Award and one Best Paper award for CONISAR 2008 conference. Three Meritorious Award papers are in top 5% and the Best Paper Award is in the top 1% of the conference papers.

Authors of the paper are Albert D. Ritzhaupt (University of North Carolina Wilmington), Karthikeyan Umapathy (University of North Florida), and Lisa Jamba (University of North Florida).

Here is the link to access our paper: http://isedj.org/isecon/2008/3524/index.html

Position Paper accepted for publication at the ONISW 2008

Position paper titled "Toward Generic, Immersive, and Collaborative Solutions to the Data Interoperability Problem which Target End-Users" is accepted for publication in the 2nd International workshop on Ontologies and Information Systems for the Semantic Web (ONISW 2008) to held along with the ACM 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management in Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa: Napa Valley, California, October 26-30, 2008.

Authors: Arturo J. Sánchez-Ruíz, Karthikeyan Umapathy, and Pat Hayes

Abstract:
In this position paper we describe our vision of a “just-in-time” approach to the Data Interoperability Problem (a.k.a.INTEROP.) It empowers data stakeholders (e.g. data producers and data consumers) with integrated tools to interact and collaborate with each other while directly manipulating visual representations of their data in an immersive environment
(e.g. implemented via Second Life.) The semantics of these visual representations and the operations associated with the data are supported by ontologies defined using the Common Logic Framework (CL). Data operations gestured by the stakeholders, through their avatars, are translated to a variety of generated resources such as multi-language source code, visualizations, web pages, and web services. The generality of the approach is supported by a plug-in architecture which allows expert users to customize tasks such as data admission, data manipulation in the immersive world, and automatic generation of resources. This approach is designed with a mindset aimed at enabling stakeholders from diverse domains to exchange data and generate new knowledge.

Link to ONISW 2008: http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/hhan/ONISW2008/

Publicity Chair for DESRIST 2009

Fourth International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST) will be in Philadelphia, PA on May 7‐9, 2009.

This year conference theme is "Diversity in Design Science."

Here is the link to the conference site - http://desrist2009.ist.psu.edu/

Here is the link to call for papers - http://desrist2009.ist.psu.edu/submit.html

Important Dates

• Submission: Jan 22, 2009
• Acceptance: Mar 10, 2009
• Camera Ready Submission: Apr 10, 2009
• Early Registration Closes: Apr 10, 2009
• Conference Dates: May 7‐9, 2009

Select Papers will be invited to Journal of the AIS

Review of Language-Action Perspective (LAP)

Book chapter titled "A Review of the Language-Action Perspective (LAP) Approach in Information Systems Research" is accepted to be published as a book chapter in Handbook of Research on Contemporary Theoretical Models in Information Systems.

ABSTRACT

The Language-Action Perspective (LAP) provides an alternative foundation for analyzing and designing effective information systems. The fundamental principle of the LAP approach is people perform actions through communication; therefore, the role of information systems is to support such communications among people to achieve business goals. Basing on linguistic and communicative theories, the LAP approach provides guidance for researchers to gain understanding on how people use communication to coordinate their activities to achieve common goal. Web services, a leading technology to develop information systems, aims to support communication among services to achieve business goals. The close match between fundamental principles of web services and the LAP approach suggests that researchers can use the LAP approach as a theoretical guidance to analyze and resolve web service problems. This chapter provides a comprehensive starting point for researchers, practitioners, and students to gain understanding of the LAP approach.

Nominated for Best Paper Award at DESRIST 2008

I presented paper titled "Designing Enterprise Integration Solutions - Effectively" at the Design Science Research Conference in Atlanta, GA, USA on Thursday May 8.

Paper was nominated for Best Paper Award.

However, the award went to Paper titled "Twelve Theses on Information Systems as a Design Science" authored by Juhani Iivari (University of Oulu).

Best student paper award went to paper titled "Secure Activity Resource Coordination: A Method to Design Secure Business Processes" authored by Fergle D'Aubeterre, Rahul Singh, and Lakshmi Iyer (University of North Carolina at Greensboro).

Jay Nunamaker (University of Arizona) and Salvatore March (Vanderbilt University) were inducted to the Information Systems Design Science Hall of Fame.

Next year Design Science Conference (DESRIST) 2009 will be held at Philadelphia, PA, USA. Program Chair for DESRIST 2009 would be Sandeep Purao from College of Information Science and Technology, Pennsylvania State University.

Paper accepted at the IEEE Symposium on SOA Standards

Paper Title: Standardizing Web Services: Overcoming ‘Design by Committee’

Abstract:
Web service standards, like several other IT standards, are anticipatory, i.e., they are designed and codified in anticipation of actual adoption and use. As a result, the setting of web service standards takes on properties that resemble the designing of software artifacts. In contrast, the traditional perspective on standards views them as law-like systems that legislate modes of
behavior, product structures or specifications. The two perspectives – ‘design’ and ‘legislation’ – can sometimes be at odds. In the software engineering community, the phrase ‘design by committee’ has come to symbolize designs that are not effective, not elegant and not addressing issues that are core to the original intentions. Current efforts and recent outcomes in web
services standards appear to have overcome this taboo. We demonstrate, with the help of an empirical study, how the participants interact, and the roles they take on to produce web service standards.

Authors: Sandeep Purao, John Bagby, and Karthikeyan Umapathy

This paper will be published in the IEEE Symposium on SOA Standards, which will be held along with IEEE Services 2008 conference.

http://conferences.computer.org/services/2008/ieee.htm

Paper accepted at the Services Computing Conference (SCC) 2008

Paper Title:
Representing and Accessing Design Knowledge for Service Integration

Abstract:
Process construction from existing services requires use of appropriate design knowledge. For services that are mapped to underlying legacy applications, this takes the form of enterprise integration solutions. Design knowledge in this domain is available in the form of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). These patterns are, however, difficult to understand; they also use primitives that are different from those used for process representation. As a result, accessing EIP based on process requirements remains a cognitively demanding task for designers. In this paper, we describe a knowledge-base that represents the EIPs, infusing them with semantics derived from speech acts; and a set of heuristics, which can be used to retrieve EIPs for a set of requirements. An example serves to illustrate how the two can work in tandem to assist the designer.

Co-Authored with Sandeep Purao.

IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2008) will be held on July 8-11, 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
http://conferences.computer.org/scc/2008/

Paper accepted at the Design Science Research 2008 Conference

Paper Title: Designing Enterprise Integration Solutions - Effectively

Abstract: The design of large and complex enterprise integration solutions is a difficult task because designers must respond not only to the ‘requirements’ from a diverse set of users, but also because a successful design outcome must respond to the ‘constraints’ provided by the current set of legacy applications. The problem, therefore, belongs to a category of problems where design knowledge is difficult to articulate and reuse. In particular, the nature and form of knowledge for conceptual design of systems integration solutions continues to be a concern. In this paper, we investigate whether design knowledge in the form of patterns can be reused to develop systems integration solutions, and whether such reuse leads to more effective design outcomes. The research follows Design Science guidelines in that we describe a research artifact, and evaluate it to assess whether it meets the intended goals. The results indicate that approaches to facilitate reuse of conceptual design knowledge are feasible in the domain of enterprise integration, and that such reuse does, in fact, lead to more effective design solutions.

Co-authors: Sandeep Purao and Russell R. Barton

Link to DESRIST 2008 Conference

When Requirements Go Bad: Requirements Errors

Yesterday I attended a talk on “When Requirements Go Bad: Requirements Errors - Sources and Avoidance Strategies” by Kurt Bittner. Kurt Bittner has co-authored two books: Managing Iterative Software Development Projects and Use Case Modeling.

Kurt Bittner Bio on InformIT
http://www.informit.com/authors/bio.aspx?a=4B75C773-9B16-4283-88F9-888B641A7058&rl=1

He categorized requirements errors into three categories
1. Misconception errors – user needs misconstrued
2. Specification errors – user needs understood but written ambiguously
3. Implementation errors – communication breakdowns and lack of enough reviews and testing

While above were the core of the talk, he also provided some typical errors and strategies to avoid them. The entire talk was excellent and worth the money, given that I am teaching a requirements management course this spring.

Date of the talk: January 8, 2008
Venue: University center, University of North Florida
Organized by: North Florida Rational Users Group
http://www.nf-rug.com/index.php