9 Collaborative Business Intelligence

The idea of collaborative BI is to extend the decision-making process beyond the company boundaries thanks to cooperation and data sharing with other companies and organizations. Unfortunately, traditional BI applications are aimed at serving individual companies, and they cannot operate over networks of companies characterized by an organizational, lexical, and semantic heterogeneity. In such distributed business scenarios, to maximize the effectiveness of monitoring and decision making processes there is a need for innovative approaches and architectures. Data warehouse integration is an enabling technique for collaborative BI, and has been investigated along three main directions: warehousing approaches, where the integrated data are physically materialized, federative approaches, where the integration is virtual and based on a global schema, and peer-to-peer approaches, that do not rely on a global schema to integrate the component data warehouses. In this paper we explore and compare these three directions by surveying the available work in the literature. Then we outline a new peer-to-peer framework, called Business Intelligence Network, where peers expose querying functionalities aimed at sharing business information for the decision-making process. The main features of this framework are decentralization, scalability, and full autonomy of peers.