Are you building applications using distributed objects (DO)?
Are you doing research in fundamental technology, methodology or new tools for DO?
Are you using some of the existing distributed object systems?

Consider contributing a practice report or a research paper to this innovative event, and to present, discuss and obtain feedback for your ideas among other practitioners and researchers active in the same area.

There is increasing agreement among IT researchers and practitioners about the importance and potential of distributed object systems and the advances in this area made in recent years. These systems offer many promises for use in various applications, including telecommunications, banking applications and many other domains. DO systems are starting to offer practical, real-life production solutions to technical problems, including interoperability across different software and database platforms. Distributed object systems are built according to different paradigms and architectures, such as OMG's CORBA, Microsoft's COM and other object request broker principles and implementations, and contingent technologies such as SUN's Java-based active objects, to provide a basis for building complex distributed applications.

The future success of DO systems will not only be dependent on how the basic requirements (to develop open, reliable and scalable distributed and heterogeneous applications and platforms) are met but also how the underlying distributed object technology can be integrated with existing complementary technologies and applications, such as WWW, multimedia and databases. The reengineering of legacy systems may substantially benefit from the use of DO, e.g. when turning them into data warehouses. Further standardization of distributed object concepts will very likely unlock many new areas of application still.

TWO DIMENSIONS: Research & Practice

 
As research in DO establishes new principles, enhancing our understanding of the fundamental issues involved, and opening the way to new tools and methodologies for DO, so conversely practical experience in real-life DO projects drives the avenues of this same research by exposing new ideas and posing new types of problems to be solved. With the DOA Symposium we explicitly intend to provide a forum to help this mutual interaction occur, and to trigger and foster it. Submissions can be entered along both these dimensions: research (theory, fundamentals, principles of DO) and practice (applications, experience, pragmatics of DO). Contributions attempting to cross over the gap between these two dimensions will, of course, be especially welcome.
 
As we are fully aware of the differences in environment for research and development that exist in academia and industry, submissions from each will be treated accordingly and judged by a peer review not only for scientific rigor (in the case of "academic research" papers) but for originality and generality of application (in the case of "case studies" papers). Papers of each type will be presented in parallel tracks at the Symposium, but with maximal opportunity for interaction for researchers and developers working on related topics.

 
To summarize, during the DOA'99 Symposium we therefore want attendees to be able to evaluate existing ORB middleware products; to analyze, and propose solutions to major limitations of existing products; and to indicate promising future research directions for distributed objects. We are particularly interested in the evaluation of existing DO systems and how they are used to design and to implement large scale industrial distributed applications. We are seeking theoretical as well as practical papers addressing innovative issues related to distributed objects.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The topics of this symposium include, but are not limited to:
 
• Critique of the distributed object paradigm
• Distributed business objects
• Distributed and mobile agents
• Design patterns for distributed object design
• Database services, in particular persistency, transaction, query and replication services
• Intelligent traders
• Interoperability-supporting environments
• Integration with database systems and interfaces
• Methodologies to develop distributed object applications
• Reintegration of legacy systems in DO environments
• Design of CORBA, COM- and Java-based broker applications
• Multimedia distributed objects
• Multicast protocols for distributed objects
• Object caching
• Reliability, fault-tolerance and recovery
• Real-time ORB middleware
• Reports on Best Practice
• Security
• Specification and enforcement of quality of service
• Standardization of distributed objects
• Wrapper libraries and wrapper implementation strategies

IMPORTANT DATES

 

Electronic submission:	April 1st, 1999
Notification of acceptance:	May 15th, 1999
Camera-ready copies:	June 15th, 1999
Symposium:	September 5-6, 1999

SUBMISSION DETAILS

All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. Submissions should be clearly labeled "Research", "Practice" or "PC discretion". All papers will be refereed by at least three members of the program committee, and at least two will be experts from industry in the case of practice reports.  All submissions must be in English. Research submissions must not exceed 8,000 words. Practice reports must not exceed 5,000 words. Submissions should be in the form of a single uuencoded compressed PostScript file sent by e-mail to

                 zahirt@cs.rmit.edu.au

and must be accompanied by a separate email message with the following information on the paper:
 

title
author(s)
affiliation(s)
e-mail and address of the contact author
optional list of (key)words to appear in the index classification as research, practice or at discretion of PC formal commitment, if paper is accepted, to register for DOA'99 and present the paper


Please make sure that your PostScript file can be previewed with GhostScript and is printable on a standard PostScript printer. We also accept Microsoft Word submissions. If electronic submission is not possible, please contact

               Zahir Tari
               zahirt@cs.rmit.edu.au

to make special arrangements, at least two weeks before the submission deadline. The final proceedings will be published by IEEE Press. Failure to commit presentation at the conference automatically excludes a paper from the proceedings.
 

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE

General chair
 
Asuman Dogac
Middle East Technical University
Ankara, Turkey
asuman@srdc.metu.edu.tr


Program committee co-chairs

 
Zahir Tari
RMIT, Department of Computer Science
GPO Box 2476V, VIC 3001
Melbourne, Australia
zahirt@cs.rmit.edu.au
(phone) ++61-3-9660-3782
(fax)  ++61-3-9662-1617

Omran Bukhres
Purdue University at Indianapolis
Department of Computer & Information Science
723 W. Michigan St., SL 28 0, Indianapolis
Indiana 46202, USA
bukhres@cs.iupui.edu

Robert Meersman
STARLab
Free University Of Brussel (VUB)
Building F-G 10, Pleinlaan 2
B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
meersman@vub.ac.be
(fax) ++32 (2) 629-3525

Richard Soley
Object Management Group (OMG), Inc.
492 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, MA  01701 U.S.A.
soley@omg.org
(phone) ++1-508-820 4300
(fax )  ++1-508-820 4303
 

Organising chair
 
Peter Thanisch
The University of Edinburgh
Department of Computer Science
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ
Scotland
pt@dcs.ed.ac.uk
(phone) ++0131 650 5133
(fax) ++0131 667 7209


Publicity chair
 

Sam Makki
RMIT, Department of Computer Science
GPO Box 2476V, VIC 3001
Melbourne, Australia
sam@cs.rmit.edu.au


Program committee

     Gustavo Alonso (ETH, Zurich)
     Bill Appelbe (RMIT, Australia)
     Roger Barnett (Real Objects Ltd, UK)
     Jose Blakeley (Microsoft, USA)
     Anthony Bloesch (Visio Corp., USA)
     Sjaak Brinkkemper (Baan, The Netherlands)
     Michael Brodie(GTE, USA)
     David Curtis (Inprise Corp, USA)
     Klaus Dittrich (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
     Chris Gokey (NASA, USA)
     Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL, Switzerland)
     Slimane Hammoudi (Univ. of Minho, Portugal)
     Dimitris Karagiannis (University of Vienna and B.O.C. GmbH, Austria)
     Roger King (University of Colorado, USA)
     Wojtek Kozaczynski (Rational Software Corporation, USA)
     Sacha Krakowiak (University of Grenoble, France)
     Ling Liu (Oregon Graduate Institute, USA)
     Frank Manola (Object Services and Consulting, USA)
     Michele Missikoff (CNR Roma, Italy)
     Jishnu Mukerji (HP New Jersey Labs, USA)
     Tom Northcutt (NASA, USA)
     Kunio Ohno (INS Engineering Corporation, Japan)
     Tamer Ozsu (University of Alberta, Canada)
     Mike P. Papazoglou (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
     Kerry Raymond (DSTC, Australia)
     Jean-Bernard  Stefani (France Telecom, France)
     Hakki Toroslu (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)
     Irv Traiger (IBM Santa Teresa Lab, USA)
     Arkady Zaslavsky (Monash University, Australia)
     Roberto Zicari (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univ., Germany)
     Wilfried Verachtert (MediaGenix, Belgium)
     Andreas Vogel (Inprise Corp, USA)
     Andrew Watson (OMG, USA)

SYMPOSIUM ATTENDANCE

Authors of selected papers will be requested to commit to register for the Symposium and present their papers as a condition of final acceptance. Attendees can also register to VLDB'99 conference which will be held afterward.