The importance of modeling the essence of enterprises on a level that abstracts from operational details is increasingly recognized. Two recognized enterprise modeling approaches are value modeling and business ontologies. Business ontologies provide abstract descriptions of enterprises in their business context, focusing on what is needed to create and transfer value. Value modeling is a business modeling approach that focuses on the value objects exchanged in business networks. Business ontology and value modeling research is conducted using instruments like REA (Resources, Events, Agents), the Business Model Canvas, the e3value tool set, VDML and the Enterprise Engineering framework.

The goals of the VMBO workshop series are to bring together researchers with an interest in value modeling and business ontology in order to present and discuss the current state of enterprise or business modeling and to identify key areas for further research. The theme of this year’s workshop is value aware design of information system, but other papers are welcome as well.

If you are interested in joining, please submit a paper in the following categories:

  • full paper (maximum of eight pages) – describe original research contributions, present problems or challenges encountered in practice or report industrial cases and practices;
  • short discussion paper (maximum of four pages) – describe your main ideas. We encourage you to focus on ideas in progress for which you would like to get feedback from other workshop participants.

Full papers will be published with CEUR proceedings.

The best full papers will be invited to submit an extended version of the paper to a special issue of Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering (Springer). We also support the submission of VMBO papers (both short and full) afterwards to a special issue of a journal, e.g. the Journal of Applied Ontology (JAO) or the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA).

Note that papers submitted as short papers will be reviewed only marginally. The program committee will use the papers to put together a final program; the aim is to accommodate all relevant papers with sufficient quality.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

  • Service ontology for business
  • Service-oriented view of business ontology
  • Enterprise Engineering
  • Business modeling of service exchanges
  • Value modeling fundamentals
  • Value modeling applications and experiences
  • Business ontology fundamentals
  • Business ontology applications and experiences
  • Role of value modeling in enterprise architecture
  • Ontology-driven enterprise system development
  • Ontology-aware enterprise systems
  • Pragmatic Web – theory and applications
  • Ontological representations of aggregated data
  • Business ontology / value models for auditing
  • Business ontology / value models for managerial decision making
  • Business ontology / value models for strategy exploration
  • Business ontology / value models for business process management

Important dates

  • Jan 7, 2018 Jan 14, 2018 paper submission deadline
  • Jan 21, 2018  Jan 29, 2018  Notification of acceptance
  • Feb 7, 2018 Camera ready for full papers
  • Feb 7, 2018 Feb 15, 2018  Registration deadline
  • Feb 26-27, 2018 VMBO Workshop, Amsterdam, The Netherlands