BIN: Business Intelligence Networks

Cooperation is seen by companies as one of the major means for increasing flexibility and innovating. Business intelligence (BI) platforms are aimed at serving individual companies, and they cannot operate over networks of companies characterized by an organizational, lexical, and semantic heterogeneity. In this chapter we propose a framework, called Business Intelligence Network (BIN), for sharing BI functionalities over complex networks of companies that are chasing mutual advantages through the sharing of strategic information. A BIN is based on a network of peers, one for each company participating in the consortium. Peers are equipped with independent BI platforms that expose some querying functionalities aimed at sharing business information for the decision-making process. After proposing an architecture for a BIN, we outline the main research issues involved in its building and operating, and we focus on the definition of an ad hoc language for expressing semantic mappings between the multidimensional schemata owned by the different peers, aimed at enabling query reformulation over the network.