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Briefing on the SEDITA Launching Workshop at The University of Reading

The workshop took place on 12 November 2002 at the University of Reading. Twenty delegates attended the workshop, including 12 from industry and other academic institutes.

Prof. Rachel Harrison, Head of the Department of Computer Science, the University of Reading gave a welcome address to all delegates. All delegates then were given opportunities to introduce themselves; they were also asked to tell others their interests in the project and expectations from attending the workshop. Prof. Bob Malcolm, Programme Coordinator for EPSRC’s Systems Integration, talked about the SI programme and his expectation of this SEDITA project.  

The first presentation was from Prof. Kecheng Liu, an introduction to SEDITA, which reviewed briefly the objectives, scope and organisation of the project (the slides of his talk are attached separately). The highlight of the workshop was the presentation from Prof. Ronald Stamper, a brief overview of MEASUR. As SEDIAT aims at evaluating MEASUR, a particular set of semiotic methods developed over last nearly three decades by Stamper and his associates, this presentation gave us a quick tour of the history of the development of the theory and methods. A paper based on Ronald Stamper’s speech will be made available later. After the lunch, Dr. Rodney Clarke, assisted by his research associate Dali Dong, reported the research progress and demonstrated a portal infrastructure they have built for SEDITA. The last presentation at the workshop was from Kecheng Liu, representing his research team, to talk about “Semiotic Design of Information Systems: where to go from here?” He discussed the MEASUR methods and their applicability to information systems development. He also requested the researchers and industrialists to comment his model of co-design of business and IT systems, and his plan of work for next stages.   

The workshop was informal and highly interactive. Questions from the audience covered philosophical issues and practical applicability of MEASUR. One question for the research team to find out is what the criteria are to determine the success of MEASUR. The researchers involved in the project, with the input from all delegates at the workshop, agree that the following issues are important so the teams would take into account:

• Build expertise of teaching MEASUR
• Build up MEASUR literature repository
• Prepare the methods with a degree of articulation for use in the industry – this is extremely important when the research team is going to conduct case studies in industrial collaborators (e.g. Britivic Soft Drink Ltd.)
• Produce supporting tools for MEASUR

The last part of the day was informal discussions on collaboration between academia and industry.

A few pictures can be found here (1, 2, 3).