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First Workshop on Requirements Engineering in Open Systems
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      http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~fickas/REOS
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Integration and interoperation have become the critical issues in
engineering multi-stakeholder distributed systems (MSDS) like the
Internet electronic mail system, networks of web services, modern
telephone networks, and the Internet itself.  Consistent, well defined
protocols and other low level requirements enable these systems to
function, but higher level requirements placed by diverse users are
often ephemeral and typically inconsistent when viewed together.
Thus, for the field of requirements engineering to deal with open
MSDSs at all, we need to shift our thinking from systems having
consistent, global requirements to those in which requirements can be
user-relative and ephemeral.

Beyond that issue, however, lurks a second major challenge dubbed the
"ignorance problem": since the nodes of an MSDS are controlled by
stakeholders with different goals, priorities, and capabilities, just
knowing what they all do is a challenge.  For example, email features
and functionality have grown so complex that merely knowing a host
serves TCP port 25 (SMTP) does not give enough information to know
whether one's email message will be handled correctly.  Current web
services provide the means to discover method signatures; however,
formal service standards have yet to be defined. The ignorance problem
makes requirements validation even more difficult than it is in
traditional software engineering settings, adding lack of information
to the usual formalization and computational complexity issues.

This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and
practitioners in requirements engineering, component-based design
(including Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)), verification and
validation, and related fields to discuss the challenges of designing
and using open systems in which requirements are ephemeral and
user-relative, and in which it is difficult or impossible to know the
behaviors of all the parts of the system. Our goals for the workshop
are (1) to improve awareness and understanding of how open systems
create novel problems for requirements engineering, and (2) begin to
explore potential solutions. To help focus the discussion, we have
selected some open system scenarios (see full call for participation)
and encourage each presentation to discuss how its ideas address or
relate to the problems illustrated in the scenarios. The format of the
presentations will include extra time for audience discussion of each
presentation, hopefully allowing the group both to better understand
each set of ideas and to relate them to other presentations and to the
workshop themes.