On the 30^th March 1999 the research group Component- and Service-Engineering held the international workshop

Component-oriented Operational Application Systems (WKBA 1)

in cooperation with the GI-Workgroup Component-Oriented Operational Application Sytems (wi-kobAS) at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg.

Topic of the workshop was the component-oriented design of individual solutions for companies as well as industry specific business application systems with the goal to realize their implementation with a choice free combination of reusable software modules (business components). Therefore a business component was defined as a reusable, system independent and marketable piece of software which contains a well defined interface. This component can be used in combinations with other business components, which are unknown at design time, can be adapted to company specific needs and implements a certain amount of tasks of a business application domain. The term "business component" can be distinguished from the general term "component" at first by explicit relationship to the business application domain.

The workshop focused on the following questions:

• The standardization of business components for concrete business applications domains in terms of an identification of (standard) business components, e. g. for product planning and -control (PPS) or accounting systems.
• Basic consideration for standardization of business components, e. g. in regard to an adequate granularity of (standard) business components under the aspects of marketability and complexity management.
• The definition of a consistent system of concepts and binding agreements for the communication and data exchange between business components.
  
• (Re-) usage of existing standards.
• Interfaces and the realization of open interfaces.
• The functional conflict management, e. g. to ensure the functional cooperation of business components especially of those which are not disjoint in regard to covering applications domain specific functionality.
• The specification of open frame architectures for component-oriented business application systems and the identification of fitting, open middleware-portfolios.
• The company specific combination of business components into an application system and the adaption of the business component.
• The migration of data by adding or adapting of business components.
• The integration of existing (part) application systems in a component-oriented application system.
• The handling of integration effects, e. g. if a combination of business components offers new functionality, that was not covered in the standardization.
• The impact of component orientation on complex and complicated business (standard) application software.
• Consideration for terms and definitions and discrimination from other approaches.