CIOs are starting to acknowledge the technical value of semantic technologies (Web 3.0) for enterprises. In the last five years early adopting players have been increasingly using them in various application settings ranging from content management to enterprise integration platforms. Despite this promising position, it is still difficult to argue in favor of semantic technologies in front of the CFOs because of the lack of convincing measurable benefits.
The workshop addresses the value proposition of semantic technologies for business purposes. It is intended as a networking event for early adopters willing to share their experiences in adopting semantics at corporate level, and for other interested parties looking for best practices and success stories with this respect. In particular we aim at experience reports from enterprises addressing

• benefits of semantic technologies in SOA-based enterprise architectures
• benefits of semantic technologies for multi-device management
• efforts and problems occurring in adopting semantic technologies at corporate level, including the changes triggered by this adoption at process and organizational level, and the need for training and additional know-how
• evaluation criteria and methods to assess the quality and compare alternative technological solutions
• the way the usage of semantics achieves efficiency gains
• instruments to derive and estimate the value of semantic technologies from quantitative and qualitative criteria, and to visualize the effect on overall costs and revenues according to the economic value added principle

The workshop also seeks for original academic work in the respective field including

• methods to estimate the cost of introducing semantic technologies into enterprise environments
• methods to anticipate the cost savings achievable through semantic technologies
• methods to estimate the option of investing in semantic technologies in terms of their potential business value

We invite submissions of experience reports or research reports reflecting both research in progress and validated results that address any relevant dimension of the problem.

Interested parties are invited to submit experience reports of up to 5 pages or research reports of up to 8 pages, which will be reviewed by the members of the programme committee for feedback purposes. Alternatively, we accept the slides to be used in the presentation and an abstract (max. 300 words) including title, main message (problem statement – approach - solution) and a short CV of the presenter.

Submission can be sent by email to the workshop organizers.

For accepted submissions, at least one author must register for the workshop in order for the paper to be scheduled in the workshop program. At the workshop we expect a 30 min. presentation of the reported results and 15 min. discussion.

• May 14, 2007 Paper submissions due
• May 21, 2007 Acceptance notification
• May 31, 2007 11:00 - 15:30 Workshop at the ESTC 2007

• Witold Abramowicz, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
• Christopher Bussler, BEA Systems, Inc., USA
• Alistair Duke, BT, UK
• Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
• Thomas Hoppe, T-Systems, Germany
• Ora Lassila, Nokia, US
• Alexander Löser, SAP AG, Germany
• Christian Möws, Detecon, Germany
• Atanas Kiryakov, Ontotext, Bulgaria
• Janne Saarela, Profium, Finland
• Raphael Volz, Institut FZI, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

Bernhard Leschinger, DERI Innsbruck, Austria

E-Mail: bernhard.leschinger@deri.org