This special issue solicits papers focused on the following described research areas.

Vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules are key components of a model-driven approach to enterprise computing in a networked economy. Enterprise vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules do not exist in isolation but serve to support business processes. While many have recognized the importance of vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules in business process modeling and management, there are many open research challenges to be addressed. These challenges can be approached from different perspectives. Fundamental research explores ontological foundations and languages and methods for enterprise and business process modeling. It also covers ontological evaluation of enterprise systems and their interoperability, and ontological analysis of business process modeling. Applied research looks into enhancing business rule engines and business process management systems by ontologies. Business process modeling research aims to define how process modeling and execution languages, such as Business Process Modeling Notation and Business Process Execution Language, relate to business ontologies and rules. Enterprise integration and collaboration research addresses ontology-based service description technologies for inter-enterprise collaboration.

The topics to be covered by submissions include but are not limited to the following:

Conceptual modeling

• Ontological foundations for enterprise and business process modeling
• Languages and methods for business vocabularies, terminologies, and taxonomies
• Modeling of enterprise information integration and interoperability
• Languages for conceptual modeling (for example, OWL and UML)
• Agent-oriented conceptual modeling
• Business rule and business process modeling
• Analysis of and experiences with OMG Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR)
• Rule modeling and rule markup
• Rule-based approaches to Web service policies and choreographies
• Agent-based business rule and process management
• Integrating business rules with business process modeling and execution languages (for example, BPMN and BPML)
• Ontologies for enterprise systems
• Ontological approaches to content and knowledge management
• Ontologies for e-business registries/repositories
• Web service ontologies
• Ontological evaluation of enterprise systems
• Ontology-based enterprise architectures
• Ontology-based software engineering for enterprise solution
• Model-driven engineering approaches in enterprise systems
• Modeling and architecture frameworks
• Domain engineering
• Domain-specific business information and system engineering
• Model transformations in enterprise and business process modeling

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: May 1st, 2008
• Reviews Completed: September 1st, 2008
• Major Revisions Due: October 15th, 2008
• Re-reviews Completed: December 1st, 2008
• Final recommendations: January 1st, 2009
• Final Manuscripts Due: February 1st, 2009
• Publication Date: TBD (2009)

Guest editors

• Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
• Giancarlo Guizzardi, Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Brazil
• Kuldar Taveter, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts should be compliant with the submission guidelines and policies of the Information Systems journal. All manuscripts will be subject to the high standards of peer review. All the papers must be submitted via the online submission system (by selecting "SI Business Proc. Modelling" during the submission process).