Supporting business intelligence by providing ontology-based end-user information self-service

Business users need to analyse changing sets of information to effectively support their working tasks. Due to the complexity of enterprise systems and available tools, especially technically unskilled users face considerable challenges when trying to flexibly retrieve needed data in an ad-hoc manner. As a consequence, available data is limited to information artefacts like queries or reports which have been predefined for them by IT experts. To improve information self-service capabilities of business users, we present an ontology-based architecture and end-user tool, enabling easy data access and query creation for business users. Our approach is based on a semantic middleware integrating data from heterogeneous information systems and providing a comprehensible data model in the form of a business level ontology (BO). We show how our end-user tool Semantic Query Designer (SQD) enables convenient navigation and query building upon the BO, and illustrate its usage and the processing of data over all layers of our system architecture in detail, using a comprehensible use case example. As flexible query creation is a crucial precondition of leveraging the usage of enterprise data, we contribute to the enablement of business users of making better informed decisions, thus increasing effectiveness and efficiency of business processes.