Call For Papers

Workshop MASPEGHI

(MAnaging of SPEcialization/Generalization HIerarchies)

Workshop at OOIS 2002 Conference

September 2, 2002, Montpellier, France



ORGANIZERS

Marianne HUCHARD (contact person)
LIRMM -Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et Micro-électronique de Montpellier-,
161, rue Ada, 34392 Montpellier cedex 5, France
email : huchard@lirmm.fr
tel : +33 (0)4 67 41 86 58
fax : +33 (0)4 67 41 85 00

Hernan ASTUDILLO
Financial Systems Architects,
25 Broad St., Ste. 15-S, New York, NY 10005, USA
email: hernan@acm.org
phone/fax: +1(801)340-3279

Petko VALTCHEV
DIRO, Université de Montréal
CP 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3J7
e-mail    : valtchev@IRO.UMontreal.CA
voice (o) : + (1) (514) 343-7599
fax (o)   : + (1) (514) 343-5834


OBJECTIVE

In object-oriented approaches, the core of systems is, most of the time, a specialization/generalization hierarchy, that organizes concepts of the application domain or software artifacts useful in the development. These concepts are usually known in the object-oriented vocabulary as classes and types. For programming languages, the specialization hierarchy is implemented by inheritance, that also supports feature (specification or code) sharing and reuse. In knowledge representation and data-mining approaches, the modeling aspect of a class hierarchy prevails, whereas its main purpose is to guide the process of reasoning and rule discovery.

Design, implementation and maintenance of specialization/generalization hierarchies are difficult tasks, due to the size of the hierarchies, the numerous, often conflicting, criteria which can be used in the generalization process, as well as the natural evolution in the domain and in the knowledge about that domain, which has to be reflected by the hierarchy structure. Real challenges for new object-oriented systems include the support evolution in class membership (a person may be vegetarian/smoker for a while, but give it up later), integration of specialization/generalization hierarchies coming from different sources, or slicing of an existing hierarchy in order to provide partial views to fit specific purposes.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together people interested in specialization hierarchy design, implementation and use, to summarize the state of the art in the field (current practices and tools) and discuss open questions.

Different approaches of the problem may be considered as:

The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to:


Programme comittee (in progress ...)


Michel Dao  (michel.dao@rd.francetelecom.com)
Robert Godin   (godin.robert@uqam.ca)
Haim Kilov  (haimk@acm.org)
Thérèse Libourel  (libourel@lirmm.fr)
Juan Llorens (llorens@inf.uc3m.es )
Joaquin Miller   (joaquin@acm.org)
Amedeo Napoli (amedeo.napoli@loria.fr)
Ruben Prieto-Diaz (prietodiaz@cisat.jmu.edu)
Derek Rayside (drayside@swen.uwaterloo.ca)
Houari Sahraoui (sahraouh@iro.umontreal.ca)
Markku Sakkinen (sakkinen@cs.jyu.fi)
Gregor Snelting (snelting@fmi.uni-passau.de)


ORGANIZATION

Submission
Prospective participants are invited to submit a paper  (html, pdf or ps format). (Formatting information for authors is available from the Springer-Verlag Web site at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html ). Between 15 and 20 participants will be selected on the basis of the submitted material.

Preparation
A dossier of resources (papers, including accepted papers, links, etc.) will be set by organizers (and possibly by participants) before the workshop to exchange informations.

Planned schedule
Small presentations of a few papers will be done in order to introduce the topics. Following the number of topics that have been dealt by participants, discussions will be done in several separated groups. If so, a plenery session will allow to exchange the conclusions of each group and synthesize discussions.

Publication and Results
Accepted papers will be published by Springer in the LNCS serie. Discussions will also be synthesized in a workshop report.

New dates
  Paper submission: May 10, 2002
  Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2002
  Final version : June 10, 2002


ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Marianne Huchard is an assistant professor at the LIRMM (Lab. CNRS & Science University of Montpellier) since 1992. Her research interests include various aspects on class hierarchies (multiple inheritance, conflict resolution based on linearization methods, inheritance graph decomposition, algorithms for class hierarchy construction), and more recently control access mechanisms and exception modelling. She is regurlarly a program committee member to the french-speaking conference "Langage et modèles à objets (LMO)", and was a program and organizing committee member to the meeting of the "Société francophone de classification" in 1998. She co-organized with R. Godin and A. Napoli a workshop on classification  and objects at ECOOP'2000 and is organization chair for LMO'2002 (Montpellier, 23-25 jan. 2002).

Hernan Astudillo is a Sr. Application Architect at Financial Systems Architects (FSA), a software architecture firm in New York City. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 from Georgia Tech, where he used a bio-evolutionary metaphor (borrowing phenetic and phylogenetic techniques from biological classification) to explore the relationship between the dual roles that class hierarchies play: as ontologies (minding information correctness) and as repositories (minding information retrieval). He has been involved with object technologies since 1989, covering OOPLs, OOAD and distributed objects, and including the UML's initial elaboration process and its current reformulation. He still retains an affiliation with the Universidade de Sao Paulo, where he was professor-doutor in 1998-2000. His research and practice interests include software architecture, OO domain modeling, and typing and classification hierarchies.

Petko Valtchev is an Assistant Professor at Dept. of Computer Science and Operational Research at Montreal University, since June 2001. He defended his Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at INRIA Rhône-Alpes in 1999, on the area of knowledge discovery for knowledge engineering purposes. The thesis subject was the automated class hierarchy design for object-based representation languages. He then spent one year as a post-doctoral researcher (INRIA fellowship) at the Computer Science Department of UQAM. His research interests include topics from object-orientation and reuse, automated software engineering, knowledge-based systems, knowledge discovery and data mining, partial order and lattice algorithms. Recently, he has focused on efficient and flexible lattice algorithms for purposes of re-engineering of legacy software, in particular for class hierarchy optimization. He is a program committee member of the International Conference on Conceptual Structures (2000,2001,2002) and a regular participant in other scientific events related to class hierarchy management.