CfP: First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI2008)

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CALL FOR PAPERS: OBI2008

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First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence
(OBI2008)
http://gate.ac.uk/conferences/obi08/obi08.htm

In conjunction with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference
(ISWC2008) 
http://iswc2008.semanticweb.org/

October 26th/27th, 2008, Karlsruhe (Germany)

++ Deadline for submission: Jul 25, 2008 ++
++ Full papers and position papers invited ++

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The First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business
Intelligence (OBI2008)
in conjuction 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.

Important dates
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* Submission deadline:            Jul 25, 2008
* Notification of acceptance:       Sep 05, 2008
* Camera-ready paper submission:  Sep 26, 2008
* Camera-ready proceedings:       Oct 03, 2008

Description
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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.

Topics of interest
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Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 
* Real-time business intelligence based on semantic technology
* Merging unstructured and semi-structured data
* Mining unstructured data to extract qualitative and quantitative
information
* Multi-source data normalisation and modelling
* Semantic data integration
* Ontologies for BI data and components
* Next generation BI architecture
* Rules and reasoning for BI
* Industry specific case studies
* Prototypes
* State-of-the-art and foresight for BI


Submissions
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The following types of contributions are welcomed:
* Full technical papers, up to 12 pages.
* Short technical papers and position papers, up to 6 pages.

Workshop Chairs
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* Alistair Duke, BT Research, UK
* Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
* Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
* Marc Vilain, MITRE Corp., USA

Program Committee
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* Jans Aasman, Franz Inc., USA
* Khurshid Ahmad, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
* Prof. Ben Azvine, BT Research and Venturing, UK
* Carsten Bange, Business Application Research Center (BARC), Germany
* Paulo 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


Further information
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Updated information about the workshop can be found on 
the workshop website: http://gate.ac.uk/conferences/obi08/obi08.htm

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

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