In conjunction with

7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008)

Aim and scope of the workshop

The First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI2008), co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008), aims to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from both academic and commercial backgrounds in this emerging but promising application area for semantic technology. It will also serve as a facilitator for bringing BI and Data Mining research closer to the Semantic Web community.

The field of Business Intelligence (BI) is expected to benefit from the application of semantic technology. Semantic BI can be seen as the marriage of semantics-based Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence. Traditional BI solutions rely on extracting data from one or more data silos, performing analysis over this data and presenting results of significance to business users. There is an increasing need to provide real-time information and as such manually intensive preparation processes create bottle-necks. In addition there is a realisation that the inclusion of unstructured data e.g. text in e-mails or news feeds could provide a more complete picture and the need to extract knowledge from these as well as integrating new sources quickly has been identified. The promotion of interoperability between BI systems and components though the use of ontologies and declarative rules is another requirement.

There are various research challenges involved in Semantic BI. The knowledge extracted from unstructured sources must be of sufficient quality that it can be used to in critical BI systems and subjected to analysis alongside structured data. The correlation of knowledge extracted from different data modalities is also of importance. The representation, storage and reuse of the results of the BI process via ontologies are further challenges.

The last 12 months have seen semantic technology move closer to the mainstream. Articles now appear in the regular press, VC funding is on the rise and large companies are beginning to adopt Semantic Web standards and approaches. Business people are asking the question ‘What can the Semantic Web do for me?’ Business Intelligence is a key area where semantic technology can help solve real business problems and where success can be quantified. On the other hand Semantic Web research is now targeting large data assets (and arguably will only be successful if they can be included) that are typically seen in application areas of Business Intelligence. The naive approach of manually annotating all data is infeasible, since the annotation effort will be enormous. A working assumption is that Business Intelligence and other statistical approaches on data in various modalities (Textual, Numerical, Multimedia) will see improved results through a higher degree of structure. The use of semantic technology could transform BI by allowing more complete, higher quality analysis in a timely fashion. Applications include:

• eDiscovery, i.e. the identification of material required for regulatory reasons
• Customer Relationship Management e.g. analysing trends in customer behaviour.
• Enterprise Performance Management, e.g. analysing sales, service or financial data.
• Financial Risk Management, e.g., complying to regulations, data interoperability via ontologies, analysis of company performance

Workshop Proceedings

Workshop Proceedings are now available at the ACM Digital Library.

The official citation is:
Alistair Duke, Martin Hepp, Kalina Bontcheva, Marc Vilain (Eds.): Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI2008), ACM International Conference Proceedings Series, Vol. 308, ISBN 978-1-60558-219-1, ACM Press, 2008.

Keynote Speaker

Paolo Lombardi of Banca MPS has agreed to give a keynote talk at the workshop. Paolo is a member of the MUSING consortium where he leads the work on applying Semantic Business Intelligence to the Finance sector. Paolo’s talk will be from the point of view of a user of the technology. He will focus on the describing the nature of BI in the sector and the issues that semantic technology needs to solve.

Workshop Chairs

• Alistair Duke, BT Research and Venturing, UK
• Martin Hepp, University of the German Federal Armed Forces, Germany
• Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
• Marc Vilain, MITRE Corp., USA

Program Committee

• Jans Aasman, Franz Inc., USA
• Khurshid Ahmad, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Dr. Ben Azvine, BT Research and Venturing, UK
• Carsten Bange, Business Application Research Center (BARC), Germany
• Paolo Ceravolo, Universita' degli Studi di Milano
• Dr. John Davies, BT Research and Venturing, UK
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI, Germany
• Prof. Paolo Giudici, Universita di Pavia, Italy
• Prof. Trevor Martin, Bristol University, UK
• Horacio Saggion, University of Sheffield, UK
• Alkis Simitsis, HP Labs, USA
• Dimitrios Skoutas, National Technical University of Athens
• Marcus Spies, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
• Krzysztof Wecel, Poznan University, Poland

Contact

For further information, please send an email to obi08@easychair.org or contact:

Dr. Alistair Duke Principal Research Engineer, Next Generation Web Research British Telecommunications plc (BT) Phone +44 (0)1473 608192 E-mail: alistair.duke@bt.com	Prof. Martin Hepp E-Business and Web Science Research Group Chair of General Management and E-Business University of the German Federal Armed Forces Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39 D-85579 Neubiberg, Germany Phone: +49-89-6004-4217 E-Mail: mhepp@computer.org URI: http://www.heppnetz.de
Dr. Kalina Bontcheva Natural Language Processing Group Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK. E-Mail: K.Bontcheva@dcs.shef.ac.uk	Marc Vilain The MITRE Corporation, M/S K309, 202 Burlington Rd, Bedford Mass. 01730, USA E-Mail:mbv@mitre.org