Ontology-based integration of business intelligence

Abstract

The integration of Business Intelligence (BI) has been taken bybusiness decision-makers as an effective means to enhance enterprise "soft power" and added value in the reconstruction and revolution oftraditional industries. The existing solutions based on structuralintegration are to pack together data warehouse (DW), OLAP, data mining(DM) and reporting systems from different vendors. BI system users arefinally delivered a reporting system in which reports, data models,dimensions and measures are predefined by system designers. As aresult of a survey in the US, 85% of DW projects based on the above solutions failed to meet their intended objectives. In this paper, wesummarize our investigation on the integration of BI on the basis ofsemantic integration and structural interaction. Ontology-basedintegration of BI is discussed for semantic interoperability inintegrating DW, OLAP and DM. A hybrid ontological structure isintroduced which includes conceptual view, analytical view and physicalview. These views are matched with user interfaces, DW and enterpriseinformation systems, respectively. Relevant ontological engineeringtechniques are developed for ontology namespace, semantic relationships,and ontological transformation, mapping and query in this ontologicalspace. The approach is promising for business-oriented, adaptive andautomatic integration of BI in the real world. Operational decisionmaking experiments within a telecom company have demonstrated that a BI system utilizing the proposed approach is more flexible.