New Frontiers in Business Intelligence: Distribution and Personalization

To meet the new, more sophisticated needs of decision makers, a new generation of BI systems is emerging. In this paper we focus on two enabling technologies for this new generation, namely distribution and personalization. In particular, to support complex business scenarios where multiple partner companies cooperate towards a common goal, we outline a distributed architecture based on a network of collaborative, autonomous, and heterogeneous peers, each offering monitoring and decision support functionalities to the other peers. Then we discuss some issues related to OLAP query reformulation on peers, showing how it can be achieved using semantic mappings between the local multidimensional schemata of peers. Finally, as to personalization, we discuss the benefits of annotating OLAP queries with preferences, focusing in particular on how preferences enable peer heterogeneity in a distributed context to be overcome.