A Study on the Last 11 Years of ICEIS Conference
As Revealed by Its Words
Julián Esteban Gutiérrez Posada and Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas
Institute of Computing, State University of Campinas, Av. Albert Einstein, 1251, 13083-970, Campinas-SP, Brazil
Keywords: ICEIS Survey, Tagclouds, Paper Titles, Stringer Books, Conference Proceedings, Human Face.
Abstract: The analysis of scientific knowledge documented as journal articles, conference papers or book chapters is
important for the research community to build an understanding of their field of interest. The International
Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) is currently in its 16th edition, and it has built the
state of the art in the field through scientific contributions coming from different focuses, authors and
respective institutions. This work investigates the content of the Enterprise Information Systems
Conference (ICEIS) by analysing data coming from two sources: the Springer Books series of selected
papers from the 2003-2011 conferences, and the last three editions of the Conference Proceedings. For a
visual glimpse of the themes present in the contributions, and a starter for further analysis, we used the
expressive power of tagclouds on the paper titles. Results enabled to build a roadmap into the field, which
may inform researchers, and practitioners who are starting work in related areas, and even experts who want
to build on it.
1 INTRODUCTION
The analysis of institutional archives, as journal
articles and other media, is important for readers,
authors, publishers and advertisers to understand
better and more objectively their field of interest.
Moreover this kind of analysis is important to
emphasize the interests, identity and culture in a
certain research area over time (Soper, 2012),
providing a glimpse of trends, modes of thought and
the potential future for the area.
The International Conference on Enterprise
Information Systems (ICEIS) is currently in its 16
th
edition, and it has built the state of the art in the field
through scientific contributions in topics such as:
Databases and Information Systems Integration;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support
Systems; Information Systems Analysis and
Specification; Software Agents and Internet
Computing; Human-Computer Interaction; and more
recently Enterprise Architecture.
This work investigates the content of the
Enterprise Information Systems Conference (ICEIS)
to get a picture of the main subjects addressed in the
field, and the origin of the contributions in terms of
their authors and respective institutions. The
research was conducted from two sources: a) the
selected papers since 2003 (5
th
ICEIS) to 2011 (13
th
ICEIS) published by Springer Books (SB), and b)
the complete last three years of the Conference
Proceedings (CP): 2011, 2012 and 2013.
A set of 341 selected works was published by
Springer Books during this period: 38 in 2003, 38 in
2004, 29 in 2005, 31 in 2006, 29 in 2007, 26 in
2008, 81 in 2009, 41 in 2010, and 28 in 2011, as
shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Number of selected works published by SB
(2003-2011).
A second set of 719 works was published in the
Conference Proceedings during the last three
editions of the Conference: 361 in 2011, 165 in
2012, and 193 in 2013, as shown in Figure 2.
100
Gutiérrez Posada J. and Cecília Calani Baranauskas M..
A Study on the Last 11 Years of ICEIS Conference - As Revealed by Its Words.
DOI: 10.5220/0004895501000111
In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2014), pages 100-111
ISBN: 978-989-758-029-1
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
Figure 2: Number of works published in the last three CP.
For an overview of the themes present in the
contributions, we used the expressive power of
representations known as tagclouds (tag clouds). A
tagcloud is a visual representation of a set of words,
typically tags (labels), which gained notoriety when
it was used in social software sites such as
"del.icio.us®" or "flicker®". Each word is
highlighted within the cloud according to its
importance within the set of words, and gain
enhancement through manipulation of visual
characteristics, such as font size, color, weight, etc.
(Bateman, 2008). For Rivadeneira et. al. 2007, this
format is useful for quickly providing the most
prominent terms and relative importance of a
specific word within the analyzed set. Also, it
provides a general impression of the whole words
set and the "essence" of the data represented. For
example, in social software sites, the tagclouds can
provide an impression about interests or expertise of
a person.
Discussions in this work are situated from the
creation and observation of tagclouds formed with
the words in the article titles. We were especially
interested in knowing the main subject matters of the
Conference as revealed by the words in titles of the
accepted papers, observe the representativeness of
the contributions in terms of the diversity
characterizing authors’ origin, and understand the
movement of that community.
Therefore, this paper aims at providing a
roadmap on work in the field, and showing the
origin of major authors. This information may be
helpful for researchers and practitioners who are
starting work in the field, and even for experts who
want to build on it. Moreover, we want also to have
a look at the “human face” of ICEIS by analyzing
the HCI area of the Book and of the last
Proceedings.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2
presents the method and representation used in the
data collection and analysis; Section 3 presents an
overview of results obtained with the two sets of
data; Section 4 presents and discusses a temporal
analysis of the words in each year of selected set of
conference papers; Section 5 presents and discusses
study results for the last three editions of the
Conference; Section 6 summarizes the discussed
findings and Section 7 concludes pointing out
further investigations.
2 THE STUDY METHOD
AND REPRESENTATION
By visualizing the Springer Books selection of
works, as well as the papers selected for the last
editions of the Conference Proceedings, our goal
was to provide a general view on the knowledge
corpus in the field, enabling further investigation on
issues of interest, and showing the origin of the main
contributors.
2.1 The Review Process
The review process is a procedure based on
Baranauskas and Posada (2013), organized into three
phases that can be summarized in Figures 3, and 4.
Phase 1: Collecting and Organizing Data
In the first phase (Figure 3), we collected the
Conference information from the two sources:
Springer Digital Library (Springer Books) and the
Proceedings of the last three years of the
Conference. Once obtained the information, we
conducted a process for searching similarities
between the names of the authors of the different
papers, to normalize their writing (eg: accentuations,
abbreviations, spaces), to make correct counting.
After, we proceeded to the identification of the
authors with at least two publications in the
Conference. Finally in this phase, we localized each
of these authors’ institution, at the time of
publication, and the country where the institution is
located; of course, this information also needed to be
standardized.
Phase 2: Processing and Visualizing Data
In the second phase (Figure 4, first block), all the
works published by the two sources (the Springer
Books and the last 3 Conference Procedures) were
considered separately. A general-specific strategy
was adopted to generate visualizations for the whole
set of papers: general level for SB and for CP
independently, and specific level (specific subtopics)
of each set SB and CP were investigated. We
operationalized this strategy, using tagclouds. We
created a general tagcloud considering all the
AStudyontheLast11YearsofICEISConference-AsRevealedbyItsWords
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contributions of each information source (SB and
CP), one tagcloud for each year of the conference,
one tagcloud of the authors with more than two
works in the Conference, and, finally, tagclouds for
the countries and institutions, according to the
number of contributing authors, limited only to the
list of selected authors. This set of tagclouds, gave
us an overview of the terms discussed in the works,
representative authors, the institutions with the
greatest contribution, as well as the countries from
where these contributions come.
Figure 3: Phase 1: Collecting and Organizing Data.
Figure 4: Phases 2 and 3: Processing, Visualizing and
Analysing Data.
Phase 3: Cross-analysis of Data
Finally all the information produced in the
previous steps were crossed and analyzed (Figure 4,
second and third blocks). The analysis was
supported by a tool developed to enable, among
other things, the identification of all papers that have
some term of interest in their titles. The tool
indicates the amount of papers that satisfy the query
and the percentage that such amount represents of
the total. An example of this search can be given
with the "case study" expression; the tool indicates
that there are 4 (1.17%) works in which the
expression appears in the SB titles 2003-2011
period, and that there are 16 (2.23%) works in which
the expression appears in CP titles, within 2011-
2013 period. In addition to this information, we
know the amount per year, per section in each year,
and the percentage that this value represents in that
level. Continuing with the example, we know that
the four papers selected for the SB (2003-2011) are
in the years 2003, 2005, 2009, 2010, representing
the percentages of 2.63%, 3.45%, 1.23%, 2.44%,
respectively. The 16 works found in the CP are
distributed as follows: 9 (2.49%) in 2011, 1 (0.61%)
in 2012 and 6 (3.11%) in 2013. In addition, we can
say that these works are in the areas of: Databases
and Information Systems, Software Agents and
Internet Computing, Enterprise architecture, and
Human Computer Interaction. In addition to this
information, the tool indicates the authors who
publish on the topic of interest, institutions, and
countries. For our example, the author is: Samia
Oussena of United Kingdom: University of West
London, with two works about “case study”.
The tool was designed and built for the analysis,
under this strategy, of any conference or journal
dataset. It was implemented in the web to facilitate
use by research community. The tool is available in
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~jugutier/ICEIS.
2.2 Data Visualization
Depending on the context in which they are used,
Rivadeneira et. al. 2007 suggest four different tasks
that can be performed with tagclouds: search,
navigation, impression formation or gisting,
recognition or correspondence. Although tagclouds
are less accurate and efficient in some specific cases
than other forms of visualization, such as tables and
wordlist, the tagclouds are advantageous to capture
the essence of large amounts of descriptive
information by presenting it succinctly (Kuo, 2007).
This scenario of success, motivated by the need
of a summarized analysis of a large amount of data
is one of the reasons for our choice of tagclouds as a
visualization mechanism in this work. For further
analysis, were also used the frequency of words in
the titles and its representative percentage (Phase 3).
Considering the fact that the article titles usually
represent the content of the contribution (at least this
is a recommendation in most conferences and
journals), our analysis is done on the tagclouds
generated from words present in the titles.
Nevertheless, this visualization is only a starting
point in the process; the tagclouds provide key terms
to be further analyzed with the tool, revealing some
movements in the focuses.
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3 OVERVIEW RESULTS
To get a first impression on the whole ICEIS
content, all the editions of the Springer Book, were
taken together generating a general tagcloud
covering the titles of the complete set of 341
selected works (2003-2011). The same was done for
the 719 works of the Conference Proceedings of the
last three years (2011-2013). Figures 5 and 6
respectively illustrate the tagclouds generated with
these two sets.
Figure 5: Selected papers from 5
th
ICEIS (2003) to 13
th
ICEIS (2011) in the Springer Books.
In Figure 5, we can see the most salient terms in
the titles of various works published by the Springer
Books, relative to the papers selected from the
Conferences between 2003 and 2011.
The size of the words represents the frequency of
occurrence of the words. For example, the word
"Systems" was more frequent than the word
"Ontology". The next step in the analysis is to use
our tool to further examine the terms of our interest.
Returning to the example, the word "Systems"
appears in 38 (11.14%) of the work titles, while the
term "Ontology" appears in 12 (3.52%).
Figure 6: Papers from 13th ICEIS (2011) to 15th ICEIS
(2013) Conference Proceedings.
Figure 6 illustrates the tagcloud of the 2011,
2012 and 2013 Conference Proceedings, taking
together. In this tagcloud, we see for example, that
the word "Systems" appears in almost the same
proportion: 77 of the paper titles (10.71%), as well
as the term "Ontology" (located between the words
"Networks" and "Network" in the Figure), which
also continues to appear, in 16 work titles (2.23%).
“Data” is a word which maintains exactly the same
proportion of frequency in both sets: 65 (9.04%) of
the work titles, suggesting a core concept for the
conference community. Also, some words are more
frequent in the Conference Proceedings than in the
Springer Books, for example “enterprise” (appearing
in 19 (5.57%) of the SB titles and 73 (10.15%) of
CP); “management” (appearing in 16 (4.69%) of the
SB titles and 64 (8.9%) of CP); “model” (appearing
in 42 (12.32%) of SB titles and 148 (20.58%) of CP
titles), to name some. The opposite situation also
occurs; for example the word “software” is more
frequent in the SB than in CP (it appears in 25
(7.33%) of the SB titles, and 34 (4.73%) of CP
titles). The same result is also visible when we
consider the 13th edition of the conference (2011),
which has also publication of selected papers; the
word “software” gains relevance (indicated by its
frequency in the titles) in the SB (appearing in 6
(21.43%) of the titles), while it appears in 12
(3.32%) of the CP titles. Figures 17 and 23 show the
tagclouds for the 2011 edition of the conference
represented in the SB and CP respectively.
3.1 The Human Face of ICEIS
As for the human presence in the SB and CP
corpora, the word “user” seems to be representative
of the human side of the system, appearing in 14
(4.1%) of the SB titles and 26 (3.6%) of the CP.
Other representatives of the human side appear with
much less salience; for instance: “person” appears in
3 (0.88%) of SB titles and 2 (0.28%) of CP;
“stakeholder” appears in 4 (1.17%) of SB and 1
(0.14%) in CP; “client” appears in 1 (0.29%) of SB
and do not appear in CP; and “people” do not appear
at all.
While the word “social” is more frequent in the
CP (appearing in 24 (3.34%) of titles) than in the SB
(appearing in 4 (1.17%) of the titles), it is one of the
most salient in the HCI sections of the SB (see
Figure 7).
Other general representatives of HCI, for
example the word “usability”, appear in 1 (0.29%)
of SB titles and 6 (0.83%) of CP titles. The word
“accessibility” has the same frequency as “usability”
in the CP and is more frequent than “usability” in
the SB (appearing in 2 (0.59%) of the titles).
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Looking specifically at the Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) area of the SB and CP, we want to
close this section, with the two respective tagclouds
shown in Figures 7 and 8. In a first look, one can
notice that certain terms lose and gain relevance on
the other terms. This is the case of "Analysis" and
"Design" words. The first term has more highlight
than the second in the SB (Figure 7), with 4 (1.17%
of SB) and 3 (0.88% of SB) respectively, while the
opposite happens in the last three CP (Figure 8),
with 3 (0.42%) and 6 (0.83%) for the same terms.
Figure 7: HCI in the Springer Books (5th ICEIS (2003) to
13th ICEIS (2011)).
In this quick look, we can see for example that in
Figure 7, there is no evidence of the word
"Cognitive" (0.00%), while the term appears
relevant in Figure 8, with 4 (0.56% of the
Proceedings).
Figure 8: HCI in 13th ICEIS (2011) to 15th ICEIS (2013)
Conference Proceedings.
As expected, the HCI typical words come mostly
from the HCI area of the SB and of the CP; for
example, regarding the “interface” word, which is
present in 11 (1.53%) of the SB titles and 6 (1.76%)
of the CP titles, 6 out of 10 titles come from the HCI
area of the SB, and 10 out of 13 titles come from the
HCI area of the CP. This result reinforces the
contribution of the HCI area to the general
knowledge corpus of the Conference.
4 THE TEMPORAL MOVEMENT
OF THE WORDS IN THE
SPRINGER BOOKS
To get a sense of the temporal movement of focuses
present in the SB series, Figures 9 to 17 show the
tagclouds generated for each selection of papers
from ICEIS 2003 to ICEIS 2011, respectively.
Figure 9: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 5th ICEIS
(2003).
“Systems”, “Engineering”, “Enterprise” are the
most salient words shown in Figure 9, with 6
(15.79%), 4 (10.53%), and 4 (10.53%) works
respectively, which correspond to the selected
papers from the 5
th
edition of the Conference. While
Systems and Enterprise are expected results as they
both are part of the Conference´s name, which in its
5
th
edition was still being characterized as a
scientific community, the relevance of Engineering
seems to be the basis of that community.
Figure 10: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 6th ICEIS
(2004).
“Information”, “Using”, “Multiple” are the
relevant words revealed by the tagcloud of Figure
10, with 5(13.16%), 5(13.16%), 4(10.53%) works
respectively, which corresponds to the selected titles
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from the 6
th
edition of the Conference. While
Information had not appeared with the same
relevance in the previous edition, as part of the
Conference´s name, it reflects the expected
importance in this edition, while Systems and
Engineering go to the background. As far the Using
and Multiple words, they seem to reveal an emphasis
in diversity of phenomena and instrumentalization.
Figure 11: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 7th ICEIS
(2005).
While the words “Enterprise”, “Information”,
and “Systems” are finally all together in the
relevance focus of the 7
th
edition of the Conference,
with 3(10.34%) the three terms, “Using” still
remains in the focus, as illustrated in the tagcloud of
Figure 11. Moreover, two other new words appear
in the same salience level: “Detection” and
“Process” also with 3(10.34%) works, suggesting
search for discovery, findings, and the several
involved courses of action.
Figure 12: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 8th ICEIS
(2006).
While “Systems” 6 (19.35%) and “Information”
3 (9.68%) are still prominent in the tagcloud of
Figure 12, the 8
th
edition of the Conference seems to
have pulled to the surface the Web 2.0 issues, with
the salience of the words “Semantic”,
“Interoperability” and “Ontology”, with 5 (16.13%),
4 (12.90%) and 3 (9.68%) works respectively.
Figure 13: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 9th ICEIS
(2007).
While maintaining some words revealed in
previous editions of the Conference (e.g. Systems,
Using), the tagcloud corresponding to the 9
th
edition
shows the relevance of “Business” and “Process” in
the same level with 5 (17.24%) works, while
revealing also “Services”, with 2 (6.90%) (Figure
13).
Figure 14: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 10th ICEIS
(2008).
Figure 14 shows the tagcloud generated for the
selected papers in the 10
th
edition of the Conference.
“Engineering” is again into the scene, as well as
other words already revealed in previous editions
(e.g. Systems, Semantic, and Process), but a new
word emerge: “Models”, while “Web” grows in
salience with 4 (15.38%) and 5 (19.23%) works
respectively.
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Figure 15: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 11th ICEIS
(2009).
“Data” 9 (11.11%) and “Service” 12 (14.81%)
emerge in the tagcloud of the selected papers of the
11
th
edition of the Conference (Figure 15), while
other relevant words still remain notable (e.g.
Systems, Model, Process, Using).
Figure 16: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 12th ICEIS
(2010).
The selected papers of the 12
th
edition of the
conference, illustrated by the tagcloud of Figure 16,
reveal “Support” 5(12.20%) and the “Based
adjective with 9 (21.45%), together with words
already revealed in previous editions such as
“Business”, “Systems”. They may suggest assistance
to the systems, and the basis of the instruments
usage.
Figure 17: Tagcloud of the SB selection from 13th ICEIS
(2011).
Finally, the big word revealed in the tagcloud of
Figure 17, which corresponds to the 13th edition of
the Conference is “Software” 6 (21.43%). Although
it had appeared with less emphasis in previous
editions of the Conference, (6th and 11th editions,
Figures 10 and 15) with 4(10.53%) and 8 (9.88%), it
appears in great distinction comparatively to the
other words, in this last tagcloud.
Some words are recurrent in several editions of
the conference maintaining a notable frequency,
although not the most salient, for example
“Approach”, which may suggest the continuous
rapprochement to the new subjects being introduced
in the Conference. Other words remain in all the
editions, reinforcing the knowledge domain of this
community, as for ex. “Systems”, “Information”,
present in all the editions of the Conference.
4.1 Contributors in the Springer Books
The number of different authors in the Springer
Books, encompassing the 5th to the 13th ICEIS is
840, viewed collectively. If we analyze each year,
the distribution is as follows: 102, 100, 74, 86, 72,
66, 224, 115, 72 authors, as shown in Figure 18.
Figure 18: Number of authors in the selection of Springer
Books.
Figure 19, shows the graphical presentation of
the most frequent authors of the SB selected papers
of the Conferences between 2003 and 2011. In order
of the number of works in which the name appears
as author or co-author, we have: Maria Cecília
Baranauskas (5), Boris Shishkov (4), Dirk Habich
(4), Mario Piattini (4), Wil M.P. van der Aalst (4),
Wolfgang Lehner (4), Alejandra Cechich (3).
Of all the authors in the Springer Books (from
Conferences between 2003 and 2011), we selected
only those who had two or more contributions to the
community of ICEIS; the number of authors that
meet this requirement is 80. For each of these
authors, we identified the institution in which they
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Figure 19: Tagcloud of the most frequent authors of 5th to
13th ICEIS in the Springer Books series with at least 2
titles in the SBs.
are affiliated and the country where the institution is
located; we have identified 13 countries with at least
two contributions in the SB. The geographic
distribution of these authors can be seen in Figures
20 and 21.
Figure 20: Countries of authors with at least two
contributions in the SB.
Figure 21: European Countries of authors with at least two
contributions in SB(E).
The number of authors, with two or more
contributions, that each country contributes to the
conference shows, for example: Germany (12),
Brazil (8), Italy (8), Austria (7), USA (7), Australia
(6), Belgium (5), Netherlands (5), Spain (4), France
(3), Cyprus (2), Portugal (2), and Romania (2).
Figure 22 shows the tagcloud created with the
names of institutions with at least 2 authors
contributing with at least 2 titles; we have identified
12 institutions: Dresden University of Technology
(4), Queensland University of Technology (4),
Vienna University of Technology (4), Johannes
Kepler University Linz (3), and University of
Louvain (3), Federal University of São Carlos
(UFSCar) (2), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2),
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do
Sul (PUCRS) (2), Technical University of Cluj-
Napoca (2), Universidad de Castilla-LaMancha (2),
University of Sannio (2), and University of Twente
(2).
Figure 22: Institutions with at least 2 authors contributing
with at least 2 titles in the SBs.
5 THE LAST THREE EDITIONS
OF ICEIS CONFERENCE
PROCEEDINGS (2011-2013)
Looking at the last three years of the Conference
through the respective proceedings, we observe that
the frequent words, represented in Figures 23 to 25
are very similar with regard to the core words
(“systems”, “information”, “enterprise”), which are
also synthesized in Figure 6. Nevertheless, each
year observed in isolation, presents also some
particularities.
Figure 23: The 13th ICEIS (2011).
“Research” is a word with highlight, appearing in
13.85% of the tiles in 2011 (Figure 23), while the
word was hardly found in the other two proceedings
analyzed, and in the Springer Books selection..
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Figure 24: The 14th ICEIS (2012).
“Approach” is a frequent word in the 2012 edition
(Figure 24) appearing in 10.9% of the titles, and its
emphasis still persists in the next year. On the other
hand, “Theory” has had very low frequency in the
titles of the same edition (0.6%). This may suggest
the use of “approach” in place of “theories under
construction”.
Figure 25: The 15th ICEIS (2013).
“Architecture” is a new highlight in the last edition
(Figure 25), although it started to appear in the two
previous years, growing from 2.7% to 6.0% and
11.4% in 2013, probably reflecting the recently
created new subarea in the Conference.
5.1 Authors of the 13th to 15th ICEIS
The number of different authors in the Proceedings
of the 13
th
, 14
th
and 15
th
ICEIS is 1730, viewed
collectively. If we analyze each year, the distribution
is as shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Number of authors in the proceedings.
Year
Number of
different authors
2011 833
2012 479
2013 547
In Figure 26, we can see the graphical
presentation of the most frequent authors of the
Conference between 2011 and 2013. The number of
works in which the most frequent authors appear as
author or co-author are: Zhenji Zhang (12), Maria
Cecília Calani Baranauskas (11), Andreas S.
Andreou (6), Runtong Zhang (6), Dan Chang (5), Li
Jing (5), Manuel Castañón-Puga (5), Yongsheng
Zhou (5), Gatis Vitols (4).
Figure 26: The most frequent authors of 13th to 15th
ICEIS with at least 2 titles in the Proceedings.
5.2 Countries of the 13th to 15th ICEIS
Of all the authors of the Proceedings between 2011
and 2013, those who had two or more contributions
to the community of ICEIS were 259 authors. For
Figure 27: Countries of authors with at least two
contributions in 13th to 15th ICEIS.
Figure 28: European Countries of authors with at least two
contributions in 13th to 15th ICEIS (E).
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each of these authors, we identified the institution to
which they are affiliated and the country where the
institution is located; we have identified 23 countries
with at least two contributions in the Proceedings.
The geographic distribution of these authors can be
seen in Figures 27 and 28.
Figure 29: Institutions with at least two authors
contributing with at least two titles in 13th to 15th ICEIS.
The countries of the authors with two or more
papers, that contributed to the conference are: Brazil
(72), China (67), France (13), Germany (12), Italy
(10), Morocco (10), Australia(8), United Kingdom
(8), Japan (7), Latvia(5), México(5), USA(5),
Portugal (4), Algeria(3), Austria(3), Tunisia (3),
Canada (2), Chile (2), Cyprus (2), India (2), Poland
(2), Russia (2), and Spain (2).
Figure 29 shows a tagcloud, created with the
names of institutions with at least two authors
contributing with at least two titles; we have
identified 44 institutions, among them: Beijing
Jiaotong University (35), Federal University of São
Carlos (UFSCar) (12), USP – Universidade de São
Paulo (9), Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications (8), Beijing Technology and
Business University (7), Universidade Estadual de
Maringá (6), Autonomous University of Baja
California (5), SIME Laboratory (5), University
Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) (5),
University of Campinas (5), Federal University of
Pernambuco (UFPE) (4).
6 SUMMARIZED DISCUSSION
The analysis conducted in this work did not have the
pretension of being complete; on the contrary, it has
many open issues to be further investigated
including for instance specific questions of each area
of the Conference. Some highlights of analysis are
synthesized as follows.
Regarding the reach of ICEIS
By considering the origin of contributions, we
see that the conference has had contributions of all
the five world continents (America, Europe,
Oceania, Asia, Africa), with 86 (33.20%), 61
(23.55%), 8 (3.09%), 78 (30.12%), and 16 (6.18%)
authors respectively (considering only the
Proceedings).
Observing the most salient countries, as revealed
by the tagclouds representing the last three
Conference Proceedings, several European countries
are highlighted (e.g. France, Germany, Italy, United
Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Cyprus, Poland,
Latvia), Asian countries (e.g. China, Japan, Russia,
India), American countries (e.g. Brazil, USA,
México, Canada, Chile), African countries (e.g.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), and Oceania countries
(e.g. Australia).
Although the Book Series selection does not
cover contributions coming from all the continents,
they grasp America, Europe, and Oceania, with 15
(21.12%), 50 (70.42%), and 6 (8.45%) authors
respectively.
Concerning the diversity of the contributions
origin, one aspect that could be further investigated
is the cultural factor or situated character that each
different continent may bring to the knowledge
domain covered by the Conference. How cultural
factors are being treated or represented by different
groups regarding enterprise information systems?
What situated knowledge do they bring to the
general domain of Information Systems?
Regarding the representativeness of the selected
papers
In the last three Conference Proceedings, the
common salient words are: “system”, “enterprise”,
“information”, “model”, “data”, “business”,
“software”, “management”, “analysis”, “design”,
“study”, “process”, “application”, “development”,
“evaluation”, “approach”, “framework”,
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characterizing the nature of the Knowledge corpus
being constructed. This set of words is also exposed
by the tagcloud representing the Book Series,
revealing a consistent selection of subject matters for
the Books.
Moreover, this set of words are suggestive of a
common ground knowledge among the members of
this community; it also leads us to wonder about
other specific terms that may be still emerging and
could be subject for further investigation. Are there
other terms being expected to appear in the different
areas of the Conference? Which new subjects may
be emerging?
Regarding the Movement of Interests
A general look at the movement of words in the
data reveals some highlights: living aside the words
in the name of the Conference (Entrerprise,
Information, Systems) “engineering” is in its
beginning (5
th
, 6
th
, editions) reaching its peak in the
10
th
edition as the second most frequent word, being
“Web” the most frequent word in that year.
“process” is another word highlighted, as it appears
among the 15 most frequent words in 7 of the 9 SB
besides the last 2 editions of the CP; in the same
category of words that remain salient we can
observe the word “business”, appearing in 1 of the 9
SB and 2 of the 3 last editions of the Conference,
and the word “data”, appearing in 6 of the 6 SB and
in the last 3 CP among the 15 most frequent words.
The Web 2.0 issues seem to have arisen in the 8
th
edition (“semantic” being the most frequent word,
followed by “ontology”, “interoperability”).
While some words appear among the most
frequent in the first and last editions of the SB, as for
example the words “knowledge” and “learning”,
both appearing in the 2003 and 2011 SBs, other
words seem to have emerged lately; in the set of
these words are “framework”, appearing very salient
in the last two editions of the SB (2011 and 2010),
as well as in the last CP, and the word “virtual”,
salient in 2010 and 2009.
Regarding the Human Face of ICEIS
A quick look at the specific HCI section of the
Proceedings and Books as shown by the respective
tagclouds (see Section 3.1) reveals a common
ground set of words shared with the Conference as a
whole (e.g. “analysis”, “design”, “model”,
“enterprise”) together with a focus on words relative
to the specific area (e.g. “social”, “accessibility”,
“users”). This may suggest an HCI approach to the
enterprise information systems issues consistent with
the essencial subject matter of the Conference; at the
same time, HCI specific issues are being introduced
into the wider focus of the Conference. It is worth
noticing that the word “social” has arisen among the
15 more frequent in the 2011 SB.
As far further investigation, a similar study may
be done for the other five areas of the Conference, to
see their “faces” in the knowledge corpora of the
Conference; e.g. What words does the Artificial
Intelligence and Decision Support Systems field (and
the other areas) bring to the set? Are they
representative of the field?
7 CONCLUSION
The analysis of scientific knowledge documented as
journal articles, conference papers or book chapters
is important for the research community to build an
understanding of their field of interest. The
International Conference on Enterprise Information
Systems, now in its 16th edition, has already built a
knowledge corpus in the related fields.
Due to the numerous editions of this
Conference and the wide research areas that it
covers, in this paper we were interested in knowing
the main subject matters of the Conference as
revealed by the words in titles of the accepted
papers, observe the representativeness of the
contributions in terms of the diversity characterizing
authors’ origin, and the movement of the community
focuses along the years.
The basic analytical instrument of the
exploratory study presented was the tag cloud,
which produced visual representations of some of
the more relevant attributes of the data. Although
tag clouds are not a rigorous analytical instrument,
they were useful for grasping the essence of the
contributions and for inspiring further investigations,
driven by the findings.
Extensions of this work, including other data
representations and the classical systematic analysis
based on computer-supported categorizations, are in
our agenda of future work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was partially funded by CAPES (01-P-
1965/2012). The authors thank also the anonymous
referees for their helpful comments.
ICEIS2014-16thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems
110
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