2nd 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 ++
++ Proceedings to be published in the ACM Digital Library ++
++ Paolo Lombardi of Banca MPS to give a keynote talk ++

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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, University of the German Federal Armed Forces, Germany
* 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
* 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


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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