3 Workshop Goals

My recent experience in the submission of drafts [Heu97b,Heu97f,Heu97a,Heu97d] is that it is difficult to find a suitable conference for my contributions. Returned referee reports either indicate that the referees have insufficient background knowledge in order to appreciate the submitted material or claim that my theoretical discussions are confused and refer to nontrivial work on the subject.

My conclusion is that my background is incompatible with the background of some research communities and not welcome to others. My goal in participating in the FoCBS-workshop is to discuss the problem of publishing interdisciplinary results in particular between discrete mathematics and component-based software engineering. I want to analyze the background of the participants and explain my background in order to reach common grounds.

The necessity to exchange background knowledge also struck me when participating at ECOOP'97 in Jyväskylä - a conference with a topic of wide range and highly specialized presentations. Even contributions on closely related fields - one would expect to understand easily - turned out to consume much more effort for profound appreciation than anticipated.

Additionally, a one day workshop on component-oriented programming before the conference showed a worrying conceptual imprecision in the definition of a component. A discussion group that specifically searched for a definition was unable to come up with something sharper than ``a component is anything''. I agree that ``a component may be anything'', but is there no more precise definition?

It is often advised to read a couple of relevant papers from previous conferences in order to understand the background of the targeted research community and I am in favour in doing so in a sincere way. However, I believe that the publication selection process in computer science has a severe problem due to favouritism. My experience is that working out ideas myself often is more efficient than reading through the bulk of literature. Of course, there are excellent papers. - They are only hard to find! We think that the situation could be improved by rendering the referee process more transparent.