Special track on coordination models, languages and applications (track introduction)

Over the last decade we have witnessed the emergence of models, formalisms and mechanisms for describing concurrent and distributed computations based on the concept of coordination. The purpose of a coordination model is to enable the integration of a number of possibly heterogeneous components (processes, objects, agents) in such a way that the resulting ensemble forms a single application that can execute on as a whole and take advantage of parallel and distributed systems. The coordination paradigm is closely related to other contemporary software engineering approaches such as component-based systems and middleware platforms. Furthermore, the concept of coordination exists in many other Computer Science areas such as Cooperative Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Internet Technologies. The Special Track on Coordination Models, Languages and Applications takes deliberately a broad view of what is coordination. In addition to the traditional areas covering data-driven (such as Linda) and control-driven (such as Manifold) models and languages, the track invited contributions from several areas where the concept of coordination is relevant, such as software architectures, middleware platforms, groupware and workflow management, multiagent systems, etc. In response to the call-for-papers, 52 high quality submissions from 15 different countries were submitted to this special track. 21 of these submissions were forwarded to more appropriate tracks of SAC'2000, and the other 31 were fed into the reviewing process. There were altogether more than 70 reviewers and 150 reviews were submitted by them, an average of almost 5 reviews for each paper. Based on the reviewers' reports, the general ACM SAC guidelines for acceptance and rejection of submissions, and the unavoidable time and space constraints associated with any conference, it was possible to select only 17 of these submissions as regular papers and 2 more as short papers. In the process, a number of good and interesting papers had to be rejected.