Towards savvy adoption of semantic technology: From published use cases to category-specific adopter readiness models

The decision of organizations to invest (or not) into a semantic application is, currently, often based on vague considerations and personal feelings. What is lacking is a model that would help determine whether semantic approaches would be adequate, given the aspects of the particular business and concrete adopter. Such a model would however need to take into account the heterogeneity of different applications that exhibit semantic features. We present a thorough exercise, and a prototypical methodology abstracted from it, for proceeding in multiple steps, from loosely sorted and purely textual descriptions of semantic applications to structured and instructive adopter readiness models. The whole process relies on expert-level manual analysis of textual descriptions, automatic cluster analysis (leading to plausible categories of semantic applications), critical factor analysis, questionnaire survey addressing the developers of applications, and adaptation of principles known from building multi-layer Capability Maturity Models. Although the overall approach relies to a large degree on (potentially subjective) manual analysis, very lightweight quantitative evaluation was also made for relevant steps in the process.