Promoters of eBusiness and eGovernment (here abbreviated as "eB/eG") have set a vision of seamless integration of enterprises, agencies or administrations of all sizes, exchanging business transactions and documents with little or no human intervention, along known models such as value chains, supply-chains, and collaboration processes, reducing costs, delays and frictions. We are today at a point where there is enough experience behind us for an assessment, and also enough preview of what emerging technologies and standards are likely to shape the future of eB/eG, not to mention new trends in developing and publishing software.

• How much has been accomplished and what can we reasonably envision for the future of eB/eG?
• Do we have a better understanding of the issues?
• Why do some sectors move faster than others?
• What are the intra-company hurdles that need to be passed before deploying eB/eG, and is there any help coming on this side?
• Should the messengers be killed (once more) or the failed promises they made, be scaled down?
• To what extent are standards necessary, where are they most valuable?
• Are we moving toward a fragmentation of technologies and standards, or a convergence of these?
• Also, will the new technologies and practices radically modify the way we conceive eB/eG today, or merely enable differently the same models we already know?

Note: the expression eB/eG should be understood in an inclusive manner, also applying to non-governmental and non-commercial entities.

OASIS invites proposals for talks, panel sessions and tutorials related to the technology, business practices, market of eB/eG with a clear focus on answering some of the previous questions.
The topics addressed by successful submissions include but are not limited to:

1. Analysis and current status of eB/eG:
   • eBusiness and eGovernment: definitions, how different are these, current practices and standards, expectations.
   • An assessment of current status, penetration of eB/eG by sectors, who is ahead and who is behind, the obstacles, the business drivers.
   • Small and Medium Businesses: are they different? requirements and constraints.
   • The economics of eB/eG: business cases, cost reduction vs revenue generation, global vs regional market.
   • The standards currently in use, what is their value and shortcomings?
    
2. Deploying and operating eB/eG:
   • The ecosystem of a successful eB/eG deployment: vendors, user communities, standard groups, testing and certification.
   • The role of standards for eB/eG infrastructures and business domains. Enablers or hinderance? Open or proprietary? the risks of using them or of not using them.
   • Migrating or transitioning to eB/eG: human, cost, organizational and technical factors.
   • Use cases: success stories, notable failures, best practices and what lessons do we draw from these.
   • Achieving and maintaining interoperability: the role of testing, badging and certification.
   • Managing upgrades, dealing with multiple versions (infrastructure, content).


3. The major functional requirements of an eB/eG infrastructure - are they fulfilled today?
   • Messaging: functional requirements, quality of service, performance, context of operation, assumed network environment. Are we there yet in supporting these? Are current standards aligned with these?
   • Repositories: what is their role? Directories vs document management, role of meta-data, governance support, etc.How current standards support them?
   • Business choreographies: how much must be described? Enforced? Transactional aspect, Contractual aspect, relationship with business processes. Do current standards address these?
   • Business documents and content standards: what support for their management, publishing, validation, storage?
   • Policies, Agreements and SLAs: Which place for these? Their management, negotiation, standardization.


4. The new Technology Environment: how will it impact eB/eG?
   • The rise of Open Source and what this means for eB/eG: community model, business model, commoditization of the infrastructure and its ownership, moving from licensing to support and integration, synergy with open-standards.
   • SOA: complement, prerequisite or mere distraction on the eB/eG deployment path? Will it help alleviate the back-end and legacy integration that has hindered eB/eG deployments? How can SOA infrastructure (repository, service interfaces, ESB, semantic data mapping...) be leveraged for eB/eG? Will ESBs move beyond the firewall?
   • The new telecommunication environment: How will Next Generation Networks (NGN) be leveraged? Role of SOA in NGN, integrating voice and multimedia applications as part of eB/eG, exposing and facilitating the adoption of network services by IT people. Is SOA a business enabler for IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) based services? Mixed services environment (SIP - signaling protocol - and SOAP): end-to-end security, how can SOA infrastructure be leveraged?
   • The next generation of the Web, its meaning for eB/eG: How to leverage syndication and Web feeds, taxonomies, semantic tagging and searches. Services on the Web and Web services. the role of user communities.
   • On-demand Software or SaaS: is also a new model for eB/eG applications? Or is eB/eG an enabler?