Context-Aware Business Intelligence

Modern business intelligence (BI) is currently shifting the focus from the corporate internal data to external fresh data, which can provide relevant contextual information for decision-making processes. Nowadays, most external data sources are available in the Web presented under different media such as blogs, news feeds, social networks, linked open data, data services, and so on. Selecting and transforming these data into actionable insights that can be integrated with corporate data warehouses are challenging issues that have concerned the BI community during the last decade. Big size, high dynamicity, high heterogeneity, text richness and low quality are some of the properties of these data that make their integration much harder than internal (mostly relational) data sources. In this lecture, we review the major opportunities, challenges, and enabling technologies to accomplish the integration of external and internal data. We also introduce some interesting use case to show how context-aware data can be integrated into corporate decision-making.