Today I'm heading to Gramado (Brazil) to attend the ER'09 conference where I'll be presenting the paper "Modelling Safe Interface Interactions in Web Applications" and the tool demo "UMLtoSBVR: an SBVR-based tool for the validation of UML Conceptual Schemas (plus, thanks to brazilian immigration officers a paper from an Iranian-Canadian colleague)

Probably, many of you don't know about this conference, since it is now less famous than, for instance, the MoDELS conference (but much older!). Even worse, the intersection of people regularly attending both conferences is almost empty (apart from myself and the people of my group there are not many more exceptions) although the topics of both conferences are quite similar (both talk about modeling, model management, model verification, mappings,...) and many papers could be presented in either conference with only minor terminology modifications.

The ER conference, as its name reveals (ER is the acronym of the Entity/Relationship language , a modeling language created in 1976 to specify data models/conceptual schemas), is the modeling conference for the database community while MoDELS could be defined as the modeling conference for people coming from a more programming/design background. It is a pity that we don't have more cross-fertilization of ideas between both communities but I'm afraid this is not the exception but the general rule. With a short-term perspective in mind it is easier to build your research career if you focus in a single community and try to be recognized as one of its members (e.g. your paper acceptance rate will increase once you know how that community writes and review papers, the terminology they use, the kind of papers they like,... ).

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