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

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

ICEIS) to 2011 (13

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

 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

ICEIS (2003) to 13

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

edition of the Conference. While

Systems and Enterprise are expected results as they

both are part of the Conference´s name, which in its

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

, 14

and 15

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

, 6

, editions) reaching its peak in the

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

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.

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