Information-integrated collaboration networks have become an important part of today’s complex enterprise systems – given the high dynamics of network-centric systems, which need to react to changes at the level of their information and communication space by providing flexible mechanisms to manage a wide variety of information resources, which are heterogeneous, decentralized, and constantly evolving. Semantic technologies promise to deliver innovative and effective solutions to this problem, facilitating the realization of information integration mechanisms in collaboration systems. 

Two fundamental problems are inherent to the design of integrated collaboration solutions: (i) semantic inaccessibility, caused by the failure to explicitly specify the semantic content of the information contained within the subsystems that must share information in order to collaborate effectively; and (ii) logical disconnectedness: caused by the failure to explicitly represent constraints between the information managed by the different collaborating subsystems. 

Mainstream EAI technologies deal with information and information management tasks at the syntactic level. Data protocols and standards that are used to facilitate seamless information exchange and ‘plug and play’ interoperability do not take into account the meaning of the underlying information and the view of the individual stakeholders on the information exchanged. What is lacking are mechanisms that have the ability to capture, store, and manage the meaning of the data and artifacts that need to be shared for collaborative problem solving, decision support, planning, and execution. 

Semantic information sharing and integration technologies will provide an important collaboration enabling mechanism for the emerging net-centric systems and the information grid. Further, it is likely that advances in this area will support multiple modes of collaboration with disparate and cross-cutting technologies. This workshop, held as part of CTS 2016, will bring together researchers and experts interested in bridging the gaps between the different technologies, and between technologies and applications. We invite original contributions on the technology practice and user experience for these emerging and important areas from researchers in academia, industry, and research institutions.