A call for action from Jean-Marie Favre regarding the constitution of  a body of knowledge on language engineering: the SL(E)BOK. Enter Jean-Marie.

Dear colleagues,
As you might know (or not) that we are launching an ambitious project: creating a cartography of concepts, people, teams, resources (books, events, papers, web sites, tutorials, chrestomaties, repositories, etc) about software languages.

The goal is to constitute a body of knowledge (BOK)
about software languages in a research 2.0 way.

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This project is about you, your knowledge, and our communities.
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This research 2.0 project aims to cover in an integrated way modelware, grammarware, ontoware, dataware, schemaware, etc. following the recents efforts and trends in establishing bridges between technological spaces over the last years. Overall we can be collectively happy with what happened in the last year because now people that talk about grammars, metamodels and/or ontologies can talk together. This is great. Isn’t it?

If none of these topics is relevant to you, or if you don’t have neither expertise nor knowledge about this, then just delete this email.

Otherwise you should consider seriously participating somehow.

Let’s be clear from the start.

Most collaborative projects naturally fail in their infancy (just a plain reality)
– if there is no interest,
– if there is no results after a reasonable period of time,
– if there is no concrete actions performed,
– if there are just big chiefs and no “workers”,
– etc, etc, etc
This could be the case of this project. But not necessarily…

If you have a “pionneer” spirit, if you can say “why not? let’s do it!”, then you may want to participate actively from the begining. You will get a badge in the project. If you don’t like risks, innovation, or have no time to get involved in a risky project, then just have a look and wait to see what happen. No problem. At least, you know now that the project exist 😉

In any case, because most of us are paper-oriented due to career constraints, a “collaborative paper factory” will be put in place to ensure concrete, incremental results. Claiming that we will create a big document at once is certainly not reasonable.

So just let have a vision and move small steps after small steps.

Next steps?

Consider joining us to SL(E)BOK @ SLE 2012  for a one day workshop. => see http://planet-sl.org/sle2012

Whether you can make it or not, have a look also at http://planet-sl.org/slebok/

Yes, the web site is under construction. Things are not perfect.

But register to the SL(E)BOK group if you are interested and you will see that this project could fly. If you can fly to dresden, even better.

Depends on you. Depends on us.

See you there (either dresden or planet-sl.org)
Have fun