There is currently a great drive towards advancement of the technologies surrounding the e-business domain. Businesses are increasingly moving towards extensive automation of their private and public processes. This automation takes the form of complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems within the enterprise, and often across multiple organisations. To attempt to effectively manage collaborative business processes by controlling these complex interactions through current technological solutions is known to be a critical yet difficult problem. Consequently, the areas of EII consideration are multi-faceted ranging from security, reliability and transactionability, quality of service guarantees, process validation, and optimisation, through to the semantic integrity of terminology used.

Workflows Management Systems deliver effectively in the area of process enforcement, offering a clear separation of business process logic from component applications involved in process execution, thereby responding to the well-established need for application integration. The complementary role of workflows in supporting advanced database functions, offer for the first time a complete and powerful environment for information systems architects. It is an observed phenomenon that a new IT solution often triggers additional, and even more advanced user requirements, which probably would not be discovered if the current systems functionality was not so widely available. This pattern can be clearly observed in the context of workflows technology evolution, and it is the main motivation for EII's research program. The great challenge for EII experts now is to find a functionally rich and technically feasible balanced solution for this overall complex problem of integration, taking into account technological and ontological limitations.

Program Coordinator

Prof. Christopher Lueg is Deputy Head of the School of Computing at the University of Tasmania. His research interests include: spam and spam filtering, information distribution, information-level security management, information seeking, access and online communities, knowledge management, pervasive, ubiquitous and context-aware computing, and mobile computing.