PDM 2008

ICEC'08 Workshop on Product Data Management http://ki.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/pdm08.html

Located at the International Conference on Electronic Commerce http://www.icec08.org/

August 19th 2008, Innsbruck, Austria

B2B Electronic business relies on the seamless exchange of information between the enterprises involved. This workshop focuses on the specific case of product data involved in B2B electronic business. Supporting the exchange is a major challenge. Especially in technical domains where the exchange of product information is necessary for engineering processes, product descriptions are often very complex and the business partners have very specific requirements posing special challenges with respect to data modelling, -integration and validation. Further, as a result of shorter innovation cycles and a focus on customized solutions there is an increasing need for providing advanced customization and configuration services to potential customers.

Traditionally, product data mostly resides in intra-organizational systems, especially ERP, product data management (PDM), and, more recently, product life-cycle management (PLM) systems. These Systems are typically used for internal data management. Using them as a basis for publishing and exchanging product data between enterprises and providing advanced services such as matchmaking, customization and configuration of complex products from components is a major challenge. As successful solutions show, an integration of internal data management and e-business solutions provides major benefits as it reduces the manual effort needed to feed data into the e-business applications. Further, integrated solutions ensure consistency and up-to-dateness of the product catalogues.

Solutions to successful product data management have to include technical as well as organizational aspects. On the technical side, a number of product classification such as eClass and UNSPSC and product dictionaries (sometimes called product ontologies or reference libraries) have been developed, often based on standards like ISO 13584 and ISO 15926. In addition, STEP standards have been developed for the exchange of product models and geometry information. For all these representations of product data, different kind of exchange format exists, ranging from simple table structures (csv files) to XML structures like BMEcat or OntoML to STEP physical files. In parallel, new developments in the area of semantic technologies promise to facilitate advanced integration, matchmaking and configuration functionalities. Product Ontologies that can be derived from existing standards on the one hand and Rules and Constraint-based systems on the other hand are the basis for promising approaches.

Aim of the Workshop

The workshop aims at identifying challenges and open problems related to the use of internal product data for advanced e-business solutions as well as examples of promising approaches and successful solutions to the problem. In particular, we want to discuss the role of existing standards on the one hand and the use of semantic technologies such as ontologies and rule languages as a basis for advanced ecommerce services related to complex products on the other hand. An important question in this context is on the complementarity of existing standards and semantic technologies.

Topics of Interest

We invite research papers as well as statements of interest and experience reports on the following topics:

* Product Lifecycle Management and Electronic Business * Product Classifications and Product Data Exchange Standards * Semantic Modelling of Products and Product Classes * Integration and Conversion of Product Data * Matchmaking for Complex Product Descriptions * Product Configuration and Customization

The workshop aims at bridging between research and practical problems in the area of product data management, we therefore especially invite contributions from industry.

Submissions

Contributions should be submitted to the review management system at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pdm08 no later than July 15th. We consider contributions of the following form:

* Full Papers (max 8 Pages) * Short Papers (max 4 Pages) * Statements of Interest (1 Page)

The authors of all accepted contribution will get the opportunity to present their ideas in the workshop. The lenghts of the presentation slots will be determined based on the amount of submissions received. Papers should be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Style (Word and Latex Templates are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates).

We plan to publish post-proceedings of the workshop either as part of the ACM digital library or in terms of a special Issue of a journal in the area.

Organizers

Prof. Dr. Heiner Stuckenschmidt (main contact)

Mannheimer Zentrum f?r Wirtschaftsinformatik University of Mannheim A5, 6 68159 Mannheim, Germany www.win.uni-mannheim.de

Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp

E-Business and Web Science Research Group Bundeswehr University Munich Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39 D-85579 Neubiberg, Germany http://www.heppnetz.de

Dr. Wolfgang Wilkes

FernUniversit?t Hagen Praktische Informatik I Universit?tsstr. 1 58097 Hagen, Germany http://pi1.fernuni-hagen.de

Tentative Programm Comittee

* Tommaso Di Noia (Technical University of Bari) * Axel Hahn (University of Oldenburg) * J?rg Leukel (University of Hohenheim) * Christian Liebig (Pepperl und Fuchs) * Guy Pierra (LISI/ENSMA, France) * Christoph Ranze (encoway GmbH) * Josef Schmelter (PHOENIX CONTACT) * Volker Schmitz (University of Duisburg-Essen) * Holger Wache (University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland) * to be completed... 	 This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP