WP4, Cost, benefits, and incentives

WP4 complements the ACTIVE RTD by investigating economic and social aspects – costs, benefits, and incentives - related to Web2.0 and Semantic Web technologies - as pre-requisites for their large scale adoption at corporate level.
The technologies employed in ACTIVE, particularly semantics and Web 2.0, offer new ways to build, deploy and maintain corporate knowledge management solutions, which are expected to result in significantly increased productivity or cost savings.

As a first objective of WP4 we will further investigate these issues and produce reliable methods to assess the costs of core Web2.0 and semantic technological solutions such as folksonomies, (lightweight) ontologies or tagging systems in order to demonstrate their tangible and measurable total benefits within enterprises as an argument to encourage their adoption. A model for cost prediction for the development, maintenance and usage of these technological components will be developed. Based on this prediction model a tool suite for effort estimation, planning and controlling will be developed, as well as prototypical methods to integrate cost-benefit rationales into collaborative, evolving knowledge creation and elicitation tasks. The results of this objective will also be used as initial input for quantifying the business benefits evaluation task in WP7.

The second objective pursued in WP4 is the investigation of the incentive structures underlying Web 2.0 and semantic applications, and to use the results to ease the acceptance of ACTIVE technology in the cases studies and beyond. For this purpose we will conduct empirical studies of the current incentives (formal and informal) in the systems used by knowledge workers at BT, Accenture, and Cadence, complemented by comparative surveys of the incentives in Web2.0 applications which are known to be attractive, from the non-commercial, leisure, and the business domain. Experimental tests of alternative incentives structures with selected key groups of subjects from the ACTIVE case studies will be carried out. The result will be a series of recommendations and guidelines for incentive structures to be taken into account by the technology work packages WP1, WP2, WP3 and WP5 at design time, and integration into the ACTIVE case study applications.