[TYPES/announce] CfP: OOPSLA Workshop on Relationships and Assocations in Object Oriented Languages (RAOOL)

[Stephen Nelson]

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                       Call For Participation
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                        OOPSLA'08 Workshop on

    Relationships and Associations in Object-Oriented Languages

         Workshop URL: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/raool
             Workshop email: raool at mcs.vuw.ac.nz

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There is a disconnect between modelling and implementation:
relationships are prevalent in system models (for example, UML
associations, Relations in ER Diagrams) but implementation languages
do not provide first-class support for them. For example, in Java (and
other Object-Oriented Languages), relationships must be implemented by
hand using references embedded in participants. This approach is
cumbersome and error-prone, and leads to a disconnect between the
system model and the system implementation. As software systems grow
and models become increasingly complex this disconnect causes problems
not only for implementers but especially for code maintainers.

To address this issue, the software community is using frameworks and
tool support to manage the disconnect. However, this does not address
the core issue of relating design and implementation. Recent proposals
for programming language extensions to add first-class relationships
demonstrate another approach to the same problem: an increased level
of abstraction in programming languages to close the gap between model
and implementation.

In this workshop, we plan to gather the growing number of researchers
in the object-oriented programming language community who are working
on relationship- based systems to share their research and discuss the
future of relationship- based constructs in programming languages. We
are interested in input from members of the programming language
community who are using relationships.

Some particular areas of interest are:
	* implementing first-class relationships
	* using libraries or frameworks to support relationships
	* relationship-based language features
	* language-level queries
	* database integration
	* system design
	* understanding or visualising programs
	* serialisation or persistence using relationships
	* ownership
	* system profiling
	* software verification.

This workshop is a successor to the workshop on "The popularity cycle
of graphical tools, UML, and libraries of associations" (OOPSLA07) and
is related to the "Roles" workshop series: Roles'07 - Roles and
Relationships in OO Programming, Multiagent systems and
Ontologies (ECOOP07).

The workshop will take place on Monday, October 20th.

Workshop Participation
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Participants are invited to submit a short position paper (4 pages,
ACM SIGPLAN format) describing their ongoing work, or longer papers
(limit 8 pages, ACM SIGPLAN format) describing completed work.
Submissions should be sent as pdf, ps, or word documents to the
conference organisers (raool at mcs.vuw.ac.nz). The program committee
will review the submissions and select papers to be presented at the
workshop based on their relevance and novelty.  Participants whose
papers are accepted will be required to give a short presentation at
the workshop (details to be confirmed).

In addition to presentations, the workshop will provide a forum for
discussing the presentations. Participants who do not present
abstracts are welcome to participate in this, provided they notify the
workshop organisers in advance.  All participants (presenting or not)
should notify the workshop organisers of their intent to
participate by email (raool at mcs.vuw.ac.nz), including short position
statement with a short biography of themselves and their relevant
research interests for inclusion on the workshop website (limit 150
words).

Important Dates
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Paper Submission:				August 21st, 2008
Notification of paper acceptance:		September 4th, 2008
OOPSLA Reducted Rate Registration Closes:	September 11th, 2008
Workshop Registration for non-presenters:	October 13th, 2008
Workshop Date:					October 20th, 2008

Organising Committee
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Stephen Nelson
Victoria University of Wellington, stephen at mcs.vuw.ac.nz

Stephanie Balzer
ETH Zurich, stephanie.balzer at inf.ethz.ch

Gavin Bierman
Microsoft Research, gmb at microsoft.com

Erik Meijer
Microsoft Research, emeijer at microsoft.com

James Noble
Victoria University of Wellington, kjx at mcs.vuw.ac.nz

David Pearce
Victoria University of Wellington, djp at mcs.vuw.ac.nz

Jiri Soukup
Code Farms Inc, jiri.soukup at sympatico.ca

Frank Tip
IBM Watson Research Center, ftip at us.ibm.com