Workshop PROSIT

PROducing Standards for the
'Internet of Things'

Zurich, Switzerland, 26 March 2008

The Advance Programme is available here

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International Conference Internet of Things 2008

The full Call for Papers may be downloaded here.

Co-organisers: Kai Jakobs (RWTH Aachen University) and Robin Williams (The University of Edinburgh).

Today's networks are hardly equipped for dealing with the amount of information to be exchanged by applications of the IoT, or to adequately accommodate the specific new communication patterns. Accordingly, new ICT systems will need to be developed. These systems will form highly dynamic ad-hoc networks without central entities, deploying different specialised communication protocols. Given the huge variety of information to be processed, equally different data formats and information representations will be in place.

The technologies to be standardised in this context will have an unprecedented impact on their environment, on human end-users as well as on companies and governments. The standards setting process will need to adequately reflect this. Thus, this topic should be of interest to the engineer as well as to the manager and the (social) scientist. The WS will provide a platform for the different groups to meet and to exchange ideas and views.

Also, depending on what needs to be standardised (sensors, RFID tags, communication protocols, services, etc) different standards bodies are involved. How these individual efforts can be managed and co-ordinated in order to guarantee (more or less) seamless interoperability between the individual elements is a crucial issue for all stakeholders.

The WS aims to discuss the development of adequate standards setting processes for the IoT. This will need to be done from a variety of angles. Both the analysis of the current situation in standards setting processes and of the current legal situation with respect to the role of standards, and the development of recommendations on how to adapt the processes to adequately serve the environment created by the IoT will be addressed through insights from various disciplines. These will, for example, include Sociology, Law, Economics, Policy Studies, Management Studies, and Computer Science.

Sample topics to be discussed by the WS include:

• aspects of the standards process' necessary democratic legitimacy,
• the necessary level of openness of the process (i.e., level of consensus required, observation of due process, 'equality' of participants, etc),
• the different stakeholders' requirements on the process,
• potential barriers of entry to certain stakeholders (e.g., SMEs, NGOs, consumers),
• new forms of participation in the process,
• analysis of today's standard setting processes with respect to their suitability for the IoT,
• legal implications of standards today and tomorrow (including IPR issues),
  how to manage relations between relevant SSBs.

The Workshop aims at serving as a platform for the exchange of ideas and views. It will, therefore, devote much time to the interaction between participants. To this end, not only submissions of 'traditional' papers are solicited, but also proposals of topics for round-table discussions or other forms of moderated interactions.

Submission guidelines

We solicit contributions from both academia (draft papers of up to 6,000 words) and practice (extended abstracts of up to 1,000 words). Also, proposals for interactive activities are solicited (1,000 words; providing information about topic, format, speakers, etc). Submissions should be sent in .rtf, .doc, or .pdf to the workshop organiser at kai.jakobs@cs.rwth-aachen.de.

All draft papers will undergo a double-blind peer-review process; all other proposals will be evaluated more informally, based their on suitability and originality.

Selected papers will be considered for publication in the Int. Journal of IT Standards and Standardization Research (JITSR).

Please note:
Manuscripts must be limited to 6 pages in IEEE 8.5x11 conference format, and formatted in strict accordance with the IEEE Computer Society author guidelines:
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/INSTRUCT.HTM

For your convenience, templates are available here:
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/8.5x11%20-%20Formatting%20files/


Important dates

27 January 2008	Workshop paper submission deadline
9 February 2008	Notification of acceptance/rejection of papers
23 February 2008	Submission of final papers

Programme Committee

Knut Blind (FhG ISI & TU Berlin, DE)
Yves Chauvel (ETSI, FR)
Tineke Egyedi (TU Delft, NL)
Simao Ferraz de Campos-Neto (ITU, CH (tbc)
Vladislav Fomin (Kaunas U. of Techn., LT)
Ole Hanseth (U. of Oslo, NO)
Eric Iversen (NIFU STEP, NO)
Kai Jakobs (RWTH Aachen U., DE)
Ken Krechmer (ICSR, US)
Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve U., US)
Roy Rada (U. of Maryland, US)
Kai Reimers (RWTH Aachen U., DE)
Mostafa H. Sherif (AT&T, US)
Henk de Vries (ERASMUS U., NL)
Willem Wakker (ACE Cons., NL)
Marc van Wegberg (U. of Maastricht, NL)
Robin Williams (U. of Edinburgh, UK)

To Kai's Home Page.