| This book contains the best papers of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2004), held in Porto (Portugal) and organized by INSTICC (Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control) in collaboration with PORTUCALENSE UNIVERSITY, who hosted the event.
Following the route started in 1999, ICEIS has become a major point of contact between research scientists, engineers and practitioners on the area of business applications of information systems. This conference has received an increased interest every year, from especially from the international academic community, and it is now one of the world largest conferences in its area. This year, five simultaneous tracks were held, covering different aspects related to enterprise computing, including: “Databases and Information Systems Integration”, “Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems”, “Information Systems Analysis and Specification”, “Software Agents and Internet Computing” and “Human-Computer Interaction”. The sections of this book reflect the conference tracks.
ICEIS 2004 received 609 paper submissions from 60 different countries, from all continents. 89 papers were published and orally presented as full papers, i.e. completed work, 145 position papers reflecting work-in-progress were accepted for short presentation and another 138 for poster presentation. These numbers, leading to a “full-paper” acceptance ratio below 15%, show the intention of preserving a high quality forum for the next editions of this conference. Additionally, as usual in the ICEIS conference series, a number of invited talks, including keynote lectures and technical tutorials were also held. These special presentations made by internationally recognized experts have definitely increased the overall quality of the Conference and provided a deeper understanding of the Enterprise Information Systems field. Their contributions have been included in a special section of this book.
The program for this conference required the dedicated effort of many people. Firstly, we must thank the authors, whose research and development efforts are recorded here. Secondly, we thank the members of the program committee and the additional reviewers for their diligence and expert reviewing. Thirdly, we thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contribution and for taking the time to synthesise and prepare their talks. Fourthly, we thank the workshop chairs whose collaboration with ICEIS was much appreciated. Finally, special thanks to all the members of the organising committee from INSTICC and from Portucalense University. |
