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
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:
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)
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
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.