A case study of linked enterprise data

Even though its adoption in the enterprise environment lags behind the public domain, semantic (web) technologies, more recently the linked data initiative, started to penetrate into business domain with more and more people recognising the benefit of such technologies. An evident advantage of leveraging semantic technologies is the integration of distributed data sets that benefit companies with a great return of value. Enterprise data, however, present significantly different characteristics from public data on the Internet. These differences are evident in both technical and managerial perspectives. This paper reports a pilot study, carried out in an international organisation, aiming to provide a collaborative workspace for fast and low-overhead data sharing and integration. We believe that the design considerations, study outcomes, and learnt lessons can help making decisions of whether and how one should adopt semantic technologies in similar contexts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.