Announcing the Open Model initiative at http://openmodels.org

The Open Model initiative is inspired by free/open source
software development projects. Its primary objective is to
collaboratively develop reference models for everyone to copy,
use, modify, and (re-)distribute.

A long-term vision of the initiative is to build a repository of
reference models for use in enterprise modelling, business
reengineering, organisational planning, and software development,
among others. As enterprise systems are one prime example of the
need for and the use of reference models, one vision is to
eventually cover many different aspects of the enterprise, e.g.,
accounting, manufacturing, finance, and marketing.

http://openmodels.org has been initiated by a group of university
researchers in 2006 following a contribution to the Open Source
Systems 2006 conference titled "Conceptual Modelling as a New
Entry in the Bazaar: The Open Model Approach".

Currently, the project seeks to build an open modelling community
and to initiate open modelling processes. The
http://openmodels.org website hosts the first Open Model
initiative and serves as the central hub for the open modelling
community.

The project also aims at developing a software infrastructure for
collaborative modelling which includes version management for
models and their associated documentation, facilities for model
review, and more.  In its current state, the project needs
visionaries, modellers, reviewers, writers, software developers,
and evangelists. Please feel free to participate by expressing
your opinion and ideas about open modelling at
http://openmodels.org.

Best regards
Stefan
--
Stefan Strecker, Assistant Professor
Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling Research Group
Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems
University Duisburg-Essen, Campus Essen, Germany
W: http://www.icb.uni-due/um