Call for Papers
===============

Submissions are sought for a Springer LNCS book entitled

       Objects, Agents and Features
       Structuring mechanisms for contemporary software

The book arises from a successful Dagstuhl Seminar
http://www.dagstuhl.de/03081/
but submissions from people who did not attend the seminar are also
welcome.

Motivation:

In recent years, concepts in object-oriented modeling and programming
have been extended in several directions, giving rise to new paradigms
such as agent-orientation and feature-orientation.

-- The object paradigm is now widely used in software technology (with
   programming languages like C++ and Java, and OO modelling
   frameworks such as UML). However, the theoretical foundations of
   the object paradigm are not settled yet, although clean concepts
   and reliable foundations are more and more demanded not only by
   academia but also by practitioners. In particular, the precise
   meaning of UML concepts is subject to wide debate.

-- Agents are more special kinds of objects, having more autonomy, and
   taking more initiative. For this reason, agent-oriented programming
   is sometimes referred to as 'subject-oriented' rather than
   'object-oriented', indicating that an agent is much more in control
   of itself than an object which is manipulated by other entities
   (objects).  There is some work on investigating typical object
   notions like inheritance in the context of agents. An interesting
   question is whether this is a fruitful way to go.  Typically,
   agents are thought of being endowed with 'mental states' involving
   concepts like knowledge, belief, desires and goals, in order to
   display autonomous and in particular pro-active behaviour.

-- Features are optional extensions of functionality which may be added
   to a software product, in order to reflect changes in requirements.
   They also cut across the class structure, because implementing a
   feature typically involves updating several classes or objects. The
   more complex the system is, the harder it is to add features
   without breaking something; this phenomenon has been dubbed the
   'feature interaction problem'. Because users like to think of a
   system as comprising a base system together with a number of
   features on top, features could potentially be seen as a
   structuring mechanism rivalling objects and agents.

The objective of the book is to explore the relationships between the
three fields. At an intuitive level, there is a high degree of overlap
and interconnection: the concepts of encapsulation, inheritance,
overriding, event, and message-passing occur in each of the three
areas.  There are also concepts which are unique to one of the three
areas, such as autonomy and intensional attitudes for agents, and the
focus on unintended feature interaction for features.  We intend the
book to emphasise the role of objects, agents and features in helping us
to model and engineer contemporary complex software systems.



Important dates
===============

deadline submission: September 1st, 2003
Notification of acceptance/rejection: November 1st, 2003
Final versions due: December 15th, 2003
Book published: February 2004



We look forward to your contribution!



Dear Colleague,

Further to our invitation to the Dagstuhl seminar which took place 16-21
February, we now invite you to submit a paper for the Springer LNCS book
we are editing. Even if you were not able to attend the
seminar, we would welcome your submission of a paper.

Please let us know as soon as possible whether you are interested in
submitting a paper. Although papers from all three areas of objects,
agents and features are welcomed, we are especially interested in
papers that integrate two or more of these areas.

We look forward to hearing from you.



H.-D. Ehrich
J.-J. Ch. Meyer
M.D. Ryan