Given these objectives, a fundamental part of the ER PhD Colloquia is the Body of Mentors, formed by invited prominent members of the ER Community who also bear a significant experience as PhD supervisors. In this edition of the colloquium, we could count with insightful comments of three distinguished professors in the Body of Mentors: Lois Delcambre (Portland State University, USA), Heinrich C. Mayr (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) and Oscar Pastor (Technical University of Valencia, Spain). For this edition, we received 11 proposals from Argentina, Brazil, France, Finland, Germany, Spain and the USA. These proposals were carefully reviewed by our mentors as well as the colloquium organizers. This process aimed at selecting the proposals whose authors could profit the best from participating at the workshop, focusing on which stage were the respective PhD projects. The idea was to favor projects which were neither too preliminary (e.g., projects lacking a specific PhD topic) nor too advanced (e.g., projects that were practically concluded). After this process, eight proposals were chosen for presentation at the workshop. Each paper was presented in a thirty minutes interval, of which fifteen minutes were dedicated to questions and comments from the mentors. During the workshop, these papers were organized in three different sessions. The first session entitled Heterogeneous Data Integration and Handling - Mobile Web Usability was constituted by the presentations: The second session entitled Methodological Aspects in Conceptual Modeling comprised the presentations: Screenography: Systematic and Adaptive Layout Development by René Noack (Christian Albrechts University Kiel, Germany); A Complete Definition of the Inheritance Construct in i* by Lidia López Cuesta (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain), supervised by Xavier Franch and Jordi Marco; A Methodology for the Design, Verification, and Validation of Business Processes in B2B Collaborations by Jorge M. Roa (University of Santa Fe, Argentina), supervised by Pablo Villarreal and Omar Chiotti.
The third session entitled Quality of Models was composed by the following presentations:
How Tacit Is Tacit Knowledge? by Ilkka Virtanen (University of Tampere, Finland); An Ontology-based Approach for Software Measurement and Suitability Measurement Repository Evaluation to Apply Statistical Software Process Control in High Maturity Organizations by Monalessa Perini Barcellos (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), supervised by Ana Regina Rocha and Ricardo A. Falbo; A Quality Based Approach for the Analysis and Design of Information Systems by Kashif Mehmood (ESSEC and CEDRIC-CNAM, France), supervised by Isabelle Comyn Wattiau and Samira Si-Said Cherfi.
Finally, as the concluding activity of the workshop, we had an invited presentation given by Aparna Varde (Montclair State University, USA). Dr. Varde discussed the general goals and characteristics of PhD Colloquia, sharing her experiences as co-organizer of the 2007 and 2008 editions of the PIKM PhD Workshop (a satellite event of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management), as well as elaborating on career advices for the PhD candidates.
We would like to express our gratitude to the ER 2009 general chair, Professor José Palazzo, to our invited speaker as well as to the PhD mentors for their invaluable support to this event. Moreover, we are grateful to the authors for submitting their proposal to the ER 2009 PhD Colloquium, wishing them the best on their research career!