Service-centric Computing

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. Yanchun Zhang is the Director of Internet Technologies and Applications Research Lab in the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Victoria University. He was a research fellow at UQ and CRC Distributed Distributed Systems Technology from 1991 to 1993,  and an academic member (lecturer, senior lecturer and then associate professor) in the Department of Mathematics and Computing at University of Southern Queensland from 1994 to June 2003. He has been active in areas of database and information systems, distributed databases, Web and internet technologies, Web information systems, Web data management, Web mining, Web search,  Web services, and e-Research.