OOPSLA '97
Monday October 6, 1997 - Atlanta, Georgia,USA

Workshop

(27) OO Behavioral Semantics

(with an Emphasis on Semantics of large OO Business Specifications)

There have been 23 submissions accepted. The list of contents can be found here. The workshop proceedings were available at the workshop and during the OOPSLA poster session.

Proceedings:The workshop papers are available as technical report called "OOPSLA'97 Workshop on Object-oriented Behavioral Semantics (with an Emphasis on Semantics of Large OO Business Specifications)" from the Munich University of Technology. We ran out of copies.

The workshop was a real success. Conclusions and a workshop summary will be published in the OOPSLA'97 Addendum: Here is a preprint.

There is a similar workshop at ECOOP'98

Call for Papers:

Workshop themes:

Business specifications are used to describe and understand businesses (and, in particular, business rules) independently of any computing systems used for their possible automation. They have to express this understanding in a simple, clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to provide the essential common ground between business domain experts and software developers. 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 which have nothing to do with business 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 exist both horizontally ­ within the same frame of reference, such as within a business specification - and vertically ­ within different frames of reference. In order to handle the complexity of a (new or existing) large system, 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 a different abstraction level.

Concepts and constructs ("patterns") common to all, or a large number of, businesses are being specified for reuse, leading to savings in intellectual effort, time and money. Moreover, precise business patterns, such as "composition-containment", "satisfaction", "decision", "contract", and so on, substantially ease the elicitation of business requirements during walkthroughs with business customers, and support separation of concerns using viewpoints. Business specifications (the "what"s) are refined into business designs (the "how"s), from where refinements into various information system (software) specifications and implementations are possible.

The aim of the workshop ­ which continues the tradition of the five successful OOPSLA workshops on behavioral semantics ­ is to bring together theoreticians and practitioners to report on their experience with making semantics precise (perhaps even formal) and explicit in OO business specifica- tions, business designs, and system specifications.

Topics

include, but are not limited to: ?

Organizers:

Bernhard Rumpe
Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, 80333 Munich, Germany

Haim Kilov
Merrill Lynch, New York, USA

Ian Simmonds
IBM T J Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, USA

Proceedings:

will be printed as a technical report of the Munich University of Technology and will be available at the workshop.

Important Dates:

Further Information:

http://www.se-rwth.de/~rumpe/publications/oopsla-ws/ or via email to the organizers.

Submissions:

Workshop submissions should be about 5-7 pages and shall be sent as standard Postscript or MS Word files electronically to Bernhard Rumpe. Authors are encouraged to present open questions, including one or two statements suitable for discussion.

Bernhard Rumpe, 24-5-97