Workshops -- Monday

The purpose of the Eighth OOPSLA Workshop on behavioral semantics is to bring together theoreticians and practitioners to report on their research and experience with making semantics precise and explicit in various OO specifications. The proposed Workshop continues the tradition of the seven successful OOPSLA workshops and two equally successful ECOOP workshops on behavioral semantics, Contributions based upon the first four OOPSLA workshops were the basis of the book "Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications", and the later workshops form the foundation of the book "Behavioral semantics of businesses and system" to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in summer of 1999. These books have been coedited by the organizers of the proposed Workshop. Both the existing book and the proceedings of the previous OOPSLA workshops are widely cited in industry including various Object Management Group (OMG) activities. Results of the earlier workshops were also reflected in relevant national and international (ISO) standards (e.g., in Open Distributed Processing) and in various OMG documents.

Business specifications are used to understand and describe businesses independently of any systems - computing or otherwise - (to be) used for their possible automation. This understanding has to be expressed in a simple, clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to provide the essential common ground for business domain experts, software developers, or any other type of an implementor (e.g., HR, sales strategists, etc.). In order for any specifications to be understandable, they have to suppress irrelevant details (i.e., be abstract) and should not be presented in terms of possible or existing solutions. It follows that, for example, business specifications do not have to provide an owner for system state or behavior (as in message passing): such owners are required by legacy OO approaches to system development which have nothing to do with business specifications. The generalized object model solves this problem by providing explicit facilities to specify and realize collective state and behavior and is becoming recognized to a substantially greater extent in theory and in practice including international standards and OMG developments.

Explicit and precise specification of semantics provides the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs (patterns) common to all, or a large number of, business or system components, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. They introduce precision much earlier than in coding, so that (for example) business people-and not the developers-can define all business rules.

Adequate specification approaches substantially ease the discovery of business requirements in discussion with business customers. They also support the clear separation of concerns-between problem specification and solution design-known since Adam Smith as division of labor. Different audiences are interested in different aspects of "common business components" and so require different kinds of specifications. Precise specification of semantics - as opposed to just signatures - is essential not only for business specifications, but also for business designs and system specifications. In particular, it is needed for appropriate handling of viewpoints which are essential for understanding large and even moderately sized systems, both business and computer ones. (Huge unstructured narratives presented as specifications are neither used nor read by anyone.) In order to handle the complexity of a (new or existing) large system or component, it must be considered, on the one hand, as a composition of separate viewpoints, and on the other hand, as an integrated whole, probably at different abstraction levels. Many concepts and constructs used for all kinds of behavioral specifications -from business to systems - have common semantics and thus are good candidates for standardization and industry-wide usage. Various international standardization activities-such as the ISO Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), ISO General Relationship Model, OMG activities around the semantics of UML and other OMG submissions, (common) business objects, as well as the OMG semantics and reference model working group-are at different stages of addressing these issues. The current extensive activities by International Standards Organization to create a new international standard for the Enterprise Viewpoint of RM-ODP, together with numerous recent OMG submissions related both to enterprise component architectures (such as the first three Business Object Initiative RFPs) and to using RM-ODP for specifications in Domain Task Forces (e.g. in the Financial Domain Task Force), exemplify the widely acknowledged industrial requirements for more adequate specification of semantics in business and other specifications of enterprise components. In addition, many recent interesting contributions in the business process reengineering area also explicitly recognize these needs.

Therefore this OOPSLA workshop is supposed to be a focal point (as the previous seven were) of bringing together theoreticians and practitioners to report their experience with making semantics precise (perhaps even formal), clear, concise and explicit in OO business specifications, business designs, and system specifications. Papers varying from research (where category theory is starting to be used successfully) through academic (transferring theory into practice) and industrial "war stories" are all welcome. Experience in the usage of various (object-oriented) modeling approaches for these purposes is of special interest, as is experience in explicit traceability of semantics between a business specification, business design, and a system specification.