Workshops Preface

This volume contains the proceedings of four workshops organized in connection with CAiSE'03, the 15 th instance in the series of Conferences on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The workshops tradition has always been very active in CAiSE, the aim of workshops being to debate traditional topics in specialized sectors related to advanced information systems engineering, as well as promoting discussions on emerging new issues. Some CAiSE workshops have already a long tradition and hence established their own proceedings series. Among those, we mention: are new components that were considered valuable additions to the CAiSE spectrum. They mark either areas of special focus in the traditional scope of CAiSE or they reach out, establishing links to other communities active in our discipline. It is those new workshops that have their proceedings collectively recorded in this volume. Is there a common theme among them? At first glance, it is the CAiSE umbrella that links these workshops. But it is more than that! It is the inherent tension between distribution and sharing, two fundamental aspects in information processing that connects the various contributions. UMICS, Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems is the largest among the four workshops. It has this tension already somehow in its title. SW-WL, Semantic Web for Web-based Learning addresses the issue from the perspective of a specific application domain. But the papers in this workshop leave the purely technical domain and enter also the broader context of content production and pedagogical considerations. One should not be surprised that the rather technical papers discussed in the DSE workshop (Decision Systems Engineering) follow straight some of the themes developed in SW-WL, e.g. when addressing the issue of Decision Support by Learning-On-Demand. How and to which extent some of the data warehousing issues are received in the business world