SemSLATES: Improving enterprise 2.0 information systems using semantic Web technologies

While the use of Web 2.0 tools and principles in organizations — a practice commonly known as Enterprise 2.0 — helps knowledge workers to collaboratively build and exchange information more easily, it introduces several issues in terms of efficiently integrating and retrieving this information. In this paper, we describe how Semantic Web technologies can be efficiently deployed to solve these issues and to enhance such ecosystems. We detail the SemSLATES methodology, a middleware architecture for Enterprise 2.0 that combines Social Web principles and Semantic Web technologies in a novel and innovative way for the benefit of end users. Since the work presented here has been applied in an industrial context, we emphasize our motivations and the benefits of the approach through a complete and real-world case study.