In today's competitive and highly dynamic environment, organizations need new so- tions to enable them to solve modern business problems and to make decisions using integrated, trustworthy, and up-to-date data. Modern real-time enterprises need to act on events as they happen. They need new, easy-to-use intelligent solutions capable of analyzing heterogeneous real-time enterprise data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. To enable real-time enterprises, we need fundamental advancements in the science and engineering that underlie intelligent information management including: the management of streaming data; the modeling, analysis and management of unstructured data; along with the integrated use of unstructured, se- structured, and structure data. We need new models and paradigms that raise the level of abstraction used in such critical technologies as ETL, data warehousing, and event and business process modeling. The series of BIRTE workshops aims to provide a forum to discuss and advance the foundational science and engineering required to enable real-time business intel- gence and the novel applications and solutions that build on these foundational te- niques. Following the success of our first workshop, BIRTE 2006, held in Seoul, Korea, in conjunction with VLDB 2006, and our second workshop, BIRTE 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, with VLDB 2008, our third workshop was held in Lyon, France on August 24, 2009 with VLDB 2009.
