Conferences as virtual enterprises

During the organization of a conference and moreover during the conference a cooperation between different organizations is necessary to deliver optimal services for the conference participants. In the m > Forvm project we apply techniques developed for virtual enterprises in the MOVE project. m > Forvm addresses optimized communication to participants as well as to supporting organizations. The integration between organizations is built on web services whereas the communication to conference participants is multi-modal. The business model "scientific conference" and its business processes are modeled with ProSpec, a graphical modeling tool. Communication processes and other workflows modeled are translated into XPDL (a workflow language) and deployed as web services. These XPDL processes are then executed and controlled by a web based process management system (WPMS). The framework and some described communication processes are evaluated at a large congress of radiologist in Vienna this year.