Vision and Goals

The vision of this network is to investigate technological issues that will lead to the development of the next generation of BI tools.

Our goals are:

• To develop novel technologies for facilitating business decision-making;
• To develop novel technologies for creating and managing integrated, trustworthy and up-to-date data;
• To strengthen the innovation pipeline of our industry partners;
• To raise the visibility and impact of the Canadian information management research community on the practice of business intelligence.

In pursuit of these goals, our network will focus on the:

• Development of an end-user-oriented business-level modeling framework where non-technical business users will be able to understand, use and evolve business schemas;
• Development of new solutions for specifying and discovering mappings between business and data schemas, and for translating business schema policies to conceptual schema constraints;
• Development of new, adaptive solutions for business-model-driven data integration;
• Development of techniques for extracting and using structured information from a wide range of document types;
• Development of tools and technology that allow unstructured data to be used seamlessly in support of decision making; and
• Development of adaptive and flexible languages and computational solutions for specifying and verifying data quality constraints and data solutions.

We anticipate significant benefits as a result of our work.

• For the academic sector:
• increased coordination and collaboration in providing training opportunities for graduate students, undergraduate students, and post-doctoral fellows;
• increased visibility of Canadian research excellence in BI.
• For private-sector developers of BI solutions:
• increased availability of highly-trained BI personnel for fast growth;
• faster market adoption of research innovations;
• reduced time to market for new products;
• enhanced productivity and effectiveness of BI providers.
• For users of BI solutions:
• the evolution of BI technologies into user-centered technologies that are accessible directly by a broad segment of business workers without the intervention of technically-trained personnel;
• an increase in penetration of BI technologies within user organizations;
• lower cost of ownership for BI solutions, as business workers find that they can change business schemas and BI queries on their own, rather than through intermediaries;
• increased availability of HQP trained in using BI solutions.