Mediation Services in Computing Environments

The technical track on Mediation Services in Computing Environments (MeSC) of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2011) will be held in Taichung, Taiwan, March 21-25, 2011.

Scope

The ubiquity of the Internet has thrown into sharp focus the complexity and the heterogeneity of its vast resources. The mapping of these resources, their transparent access, integration and interoperation pose a significant challenge that mediation services are increasingly called upon to address at different levels.

The scope of mediation has widened to span many contexts in response to the demands generated by the emergence of new environments, new technologies and new applications. In foundational systems this undertaking assumes many forms and ranges from assistance in the search and discovery of resources to arbitration and negotiation by autonomous agents. Mediation presides also over the deployment of cooperative and collaborative schemes, by marshalling resources and scheduling processes. In service provision a manager mediates adaptively the configuration and allocation of resources in a variety of environments including Grids and Cloud. The seamless and transparent transitions between different administrative domains in mobile systems are also initiated and sustained by mediation techniques. Middleware support for implicit and explicit mediation is often a core function of many systems.

It is in the interaction between humans and systems where mediation is facing its greatest challenge and where it is potentially most effective. Among the applications that fall within this scope, architectural frameworks in e-commerce, e-government and e-learning have been successfully introduced to mediate various levels of service, and create synergy between humans and systems. While hypermedia and personalisation systems represent specific instances of adaptive mediation, software agents have ushered in proxy interventions on behalf of users.

These different forms of mediation are unified into a discipline underpinned by sound principles and supported by well-defined mechanisms. The fundamental basis for any mediation is that autonomous entities and systems need to overcome their environmental heterogeneity and resolve syntactic and semantic differences in order to meet specific requirements. Effective mediation is achieved by insulating the participating entities from the complexity of the environments of their protagonists, through adherence to common abstractions. The main function of mediation services is to facilitate processes such as data and system integration, coordination of behaviour, resource access and sharing, and participation in complex activities. Mediation services play a fundamental role in ubiquitous and pervasive environments.

In managing differences between entities and resolving conflicting requirements a range of methods and techniques were introduced to support interoperation and facilitate semantic interoperability. Data transformation, resource management, configuration, adaptation and negotiation define a wide spectrum of mediation, from reactive behaviour to proactive intervention. Mediation services have emerged from their auxiliary role and are asserting themselves as independent systems whose function is enhanced by ontologies, context awareness and adaptivity.

Topics of Interest

The aim of this track is to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of issues related to mediation services across multiple disciplines and to encourage participation of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. The track seeks original contributions on mediation and mediation services related but not limited to the following topics:

• Mediation in resource management and brokering
  
• Arbitration and negotiation in mediation
  
• Data mediation and process mediation
  
• Personalisation and recommendation systems
  
• Implicit and explicit profile generation in mediation
  
• Ontologies and ontology mapping in mediation
  
• Mediation in hypermedia systems
  
• Context-awareness in mediation
  
• Self-configuration and adaptivity in mediation
  
• Autonomous and emergent behaviour in mediation
  
• Aggregation of mediation services
  
• Trusted mediation
  
• Mediation patterns
  
• Formal aspects of mediation
  
• Models and model transformation in mediation
  
• Aspect-Oriented mediation
  
• Domain specific languages (DSL) in mediation
  
• Mediation in collaborative and cooperative systems
  
• Mediation in ubiquitous and pervasive environments.
  
• Mediation in social and P2P community systems
  
• Mediation services in mobile contexts
  
• Architectural frameworks for mediation
  
• Mediation in e-commerce, e-government and e-learning
  
• Case studies and experiences of mediation services

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: August 31, 2010
• Author notification: October 12, 2010
• Camera-ready copies: November 2, 2010
• Symposium/Track dates: March 21-25, 2011

Submission/Publication

Authors are invited to submit research and application papers and follow the template provided ACM SAC 2011.The template can be downloaded from the ACM SAC formatting web page. Papers should be 6 pages long. Up to 2 extra pages per paper are allowed, at a charge of $80 per extra page. A paper must not exceed a maximum of 8 pages. Papers should be submitted electronically via the SAC 2011 website. A paper cannot be submitted to more than one track.

Papers submitted to the track will be subjected to a blind review process. The name(s) and address(es) of the author(s) must NOT appear in the body of the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. This is to facilitate blind review. Only the title should be shown on the first page without the authors' information. Papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness and clarity of exposition. The proceedings of the symposium will be published by ACM and will be available through the ACM Digital Library.

The conference registration will be via the ACM SAC 2011 web site.

Program Committee

Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Richard Anthony, University of Greenwich, UK
Irfan Awan, University of Bradford , UK
Sandford Bessler, Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Austria
Valeria de Castro,Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Kuo-Ming Chao, Coventry University, UK
Soumaya Cherkaoui, Sherbrooke University, Canada
Jen-Yao Chung, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA
Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain
Larbi Esmahi, Athabasca University, Canada
Howard Foster, City University, London, UK
Christian Glasner, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Germany
Nathan Griffiths, University of Warwick, UK
Robert J. Hendley, University of Birmingham, UK
Mohan S. Kankanhalli, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rania Khalaf, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA
Michael Maximilien, IBM Research, Almaden, USA
Massimo Mecella, University of Rome, Italy
Minoru Nakayama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Gethin Norman, University of Glasgow, UK
Kozo Okano, Osaka University, Japan
David Parker, Oxford University, UK
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Martin Randles, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Stefan Reiff-Marganiec, University of Leicester, UK
Dumitru Roman, SINTEF, Norway
Jose Raul Romero, University of Cordoba, Spain
Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Weiming Shen, National Research Council of Canada
Timothy K. Shih, Asia University, Taiwan
Georgios Theodoropoulos, University of Birmingham, UK
Mathias Weske, University of Postdam, Germany
Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain
Muhammad Younas, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Track Co-Chairs

For any inquiries please contact the track organisers:

Rachid Anane
Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Coventry University, UK

Behzad Bordbar
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham, UK

Guadalupe Ortiz
Department of Computer Science
University of Cadiz, Spain
guadalupe.ortiz@uca.es