What's Up in Business Intelligence? A Contextual and Knowledge-Based Perspective

The explosive growth in the amount of data poses challenges in analyzing large data sets and retrieving relevant information in real-time. This issue has dramatically increased the need for tools that effectively provide users with means of identifying and understanding relevant information. Business Intelligence BI promises the capability of collecting and analyzing internal and external data to generate knowledge and value, providing decision support at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Business Intelligence is now impacted by the Big Data phenomena and the evolution of society and users, and needs to take into account high-level semantics, reasoning about unstructured and structured data, and to provide a simplified access and better understanding of data. This paper will depict five years research of our academic chair in Business Intelligence from the data level to the user level, mainly focusing on the conceptual and knowledge level.