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C A L L F O R P A R T I C I P A T I O N

Synergy Workshop on Information Systems

March 22-24 2012

Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
(just ahead of and in proximity to EDBT 2012 in Berlin)

http://wwwdb.inf.tu-dresden.de/synergy.html

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Overview
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Business applications require an array of advanced technologies such as data management, knowledge management, event processing, and workflow; just to name a few. Proven technologies and products exist for each of these areas and research has never been so influential as today. However, developing and especially maintaining any application even with few incoherent technologies and products is time-consuming and far too expensive. As a consequence, modern applications have to be developed with their own technology stack – which is only justified in a very few cases – or they do not provide the desired functionality and operational characteristics.
The Synergy Workshop is designed to discuss approaches to overcome this issue and to identify the gist of a new simplified information processing infrastructure. The intent is to bring together researchers, product developers, as well as application developers with a diverse background. The objective is to discuss ways how to bring the specified and other technologies as well as recent research results together to significantly improve application development, maintenance and evolution. The outcome should be a manifesto that should be a blue print defining modern application requirements, abstractions to support them, and challenges to achieve this goal.

Workshop format
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This workshop will be conducted in three parts:
* Thursday (March 22) morning and early afternoon
--) Problem setting.
* Thursday late afternoon and Friday (March 22/23)
--) Mix of breakout sessions and general sessions
* Saturday morning (March 23)
--) Blueprint for a manifesto
There will be 3 to 4 breakout groups depending on the individual topic; each group will approach the subject from the perspective of one of the technical areas listed above. Each group will have at least one member of each of the areas. The Dagstuhl Perspective Workshops are the blue print on how the workshop will be executed.


Participants
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Members from academia, industry, and the user community are encouraged to submit a request for participation. A strong background in at least one of the following areas is required:
* Data management with focus on: database programming,
graph databases, MapReduce and NoSQL, OR-mapping techniques ...
* Knowledge management with focus on: Reasoning, statistical
analytics, description logic, crowd sourcing ...
* Event processing and Workflow with focus on: CEP, Case management ...
* Tools with focus on: Schema and data integration, data and
query visualization, provenance, reasoning, modeling ...
* Senior applications architect: Consultants or practitioners

What should you expect to prepare?
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The first part of the workshop will consist of a series of short presentations. You may be asked to prepare a presentation for one of the following subjects:
* A problem overview
* The world from the various perspectives: data management, knowledge management, event processing and workflow, and tools
* One of three use cases
* One of three potential approaches to a solution

What is the expected outcome?
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The outcome should be a manifesto that defines the problem, lists barriers, and provides potential solution to be published within the ACM Communications.

What activity should you expect after the workshop?
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The manifesto will be written and edited by a small group of participants. However, each participant is expected to actively contribute and review. All participants will be authors; an entry into DBLP and other relevant bibliography will be attempted.

What and when do you need to submit?
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Please send 2 or 3 slides outlining your personal research agenda, why you are interested in the workshop and what you intend to contribute. Please indicate also how you like to participate in the preparation of the Problem Setting part of the workshop.
* Submission deadline: January 5, 2012
* Invitations: January 25, 2012
* How do you submit? Please send your slides to
wolfgang.lehner@tu-dresden.de


Organizers:
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* Bernhard Seeger (Chair) (University Marburg, Germany)
* Andreas Behrend (University Bonn, Germany)
* Juliana Freire (NYU-Poly, USA)
* Dieter Gawlick (Oracle, Redwood City, USA)
* Wolfgang Lehner (Local Arrangements) (University Dresden, Germany)