Today, businesses want to buy applications rather than build them. As a consequence, the IT environment of large corporations frequently resembles a wild and vast collection of different off-the-shelf products as well as home-grown applications that all need to be integrated. Metadata-driven application and business model integration can play a major role in making these systems evolve smoothly.
A system with an active object-model has an explicit object model that it interprets at run-time. If you change the object model, the system changes its behavior. For example, a lot of workflow systems have an active object-model. Objects have states and respond to events by changing state. The active object-model (a.k.a. knowledge level) defines the objects, their states, the events, and the conditions under which an object changes state. Suitably privileged people can change this object model "without programming". Or are they programming after all? Business rules can be stored in an active object model that makes it easy to evolve the way a company does their business.
Researchers working with reflection and meta-level architectures have been looking at how to make systems highly configurable for quite some time as well. We hope to encourage such researchers to compare notes with practitioners who have been building highly configurable systems in industry.
Our goal is to document the techniques and principles that make these systems work. We hope to "mine" these systems and produce a preliminary collection of metadata and active object-system patterns, and help establish a shared vocabulary.