International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems
Special Issue on
Formal Methods in Cooperative Information Systems

Guest editors: Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh

Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) is an emerging research area that addresses the problems in constructing complex systems, which are made more urgent by the rapid expansion of the infrastructure for local and wide-area computing. CIS represents a collection of powerful paradigms for constructing open systems, and includes its own special theories, architectures, languages, and techniques for achieving coordinated behavior among a decentralized group of computations or agents. CIS has found application in telecommunications, manufacturing automation, and information retrieval.

In view of the increasing importance of CIS applications, formal methods for their design and analysis are becoming ever more important. Formal methods can simplify the tasks of creating and understanding complex systems, with concomitant improvements in quality and correctness. Formal methods have been proved useful in a number of computing subdisciplines. Indeed, methods and tools of relevance to CIS have been studied and developed in topics such as heterogeneous & legacy databases, federated systems, ontologies, view management, knowledge management, mediators, brokering & directory services, relaxed transactions and workflows, concurrent O-O & actor programming, high-level communication, mobile computing, concurrent engineering, business process management, information retrieval, filtering, & browsing, resource discovery, negotiation, and intelligent agents in general. Unfortunately, this research tends to be scattered across forums of different computing subareas, such as databases, programming languages, and artificial intelligence. This has led to a lack of synergy among the various approaches.

The International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems is a premier journal for the publication of research results in CIS and related areas. This special issue will focus attention on formal methods in CIS broadly construed, and their applications. It will contain high-quality articles and will serve as a cohesive reference for researchers and students in the years ahead.

Research papers are sought for this special issue. We especially welcome full-length versions of relevant papers that have been published in recent peer-reviewed conferences in databases, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and cooperative information systems. There is no strict length requirement, but papers should ideally be 10000 to 15000 words long.

Please send a postscript copy of your submission to huhns@ece.sc.edu and singh@ncsu.edu by 30 September 1995. Alternatively, you may send 4 hard copies to the address below. In either case, please send a separate message containing the title, authors' names and addresses, and abstract in plain text.

Professor Munindar P. Singh
Department of Computer Science
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8206, USA

Further details can be obtained from the editors at the above email addresses.