Business intelligence (BI) software is the code and tools that allow you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, making comprehending mountains of data easier. Applications that include reports, analytics, statistics, and historical and predictive modeling are all examples of BI applications. Currently, we are in the second generation of BI software, called BI 2.0. This generation is focused on writing BI software that is predictive, adaptive, simple, and interactive. As computers and software have evolved, more data can be presented to end users with increasingly visually rich techniques. Rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications to deliver insight from large data sets quickly. Furthermore, RIAs include 3D spatial design capabilities that allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data beyond a simple list or grid. BI 2.0 implemented via RIA technology can truly bring out the power of BI and deliver it to an average user via the Web. Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Rich Internet Applications provides developers, designers, and architects a solid foundation of BI design and architecture concepts with Microsoft Silverlight. This book covers key BI design concepts and how they can be applied without requiring an existing BI infrastructure. The author, Bart Czernicki, will show you how to build small BI applications by example that are interactive, highly visual, statistical, predictive, and most importantly, intuitive to the user. BI isn't just for the executive branch of a Fortune 500 company; it is for the masses. Let Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Rich Internet Applications show you how to unlock the rich intelligence you already have.

Business Intelligence (BI) has been successfully deployed by modern businesses to serve their customers and stakeholders. However, organizations increasingly look at BI to be all pervasive and realize its higher level of potential, instead of following it conventionally. The book covers the techniques, technologies and frameworks that can be used to build next generation BI.

Executives in Europe have significantly expanded their role in operations – in parallel to their strategic leadership. At the same time, they need to make decisions faster than in the past. In these demanding times, a redesigned Business Intelligence (BI) should support managers in their new roles. This book summarizes current avenues of development helping managers to perform their jobs more productively by using 'BI for managers' as their central, hands-on, day-to-day source of information – even when they are mobile.

In the 1980s, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) systems focused on the delivery of reports that describe the state of business activities in the past, such as for questions like "How did our sales perform during the last quarter?" A decade later, there was a shift to more interactive content that presented how the business was performing at the present time, answering questions like "How are we doing right now?" Today the focus of BI users are looking into the future. "Given what I did before and how I am currently doing this quarter, how will I do next quarter?" Furthermore, fuelled by the demands of Big Data, BI systems are going through a time of incredible change. Predictive analytics, high volume data, unstructured data, social data, mobile, consumable analytics, and data visualization are all examples of demands and capabilities that have become critical within just the past few years, and are growing at an unprecedented pace. This book introduces research problems and solutions on various aspects central to next-generation BI systems. It begins with a chapter on an industry perspective on how BI has evolved, and discusses how game-changing trends have drastically reshaped the landscape of BI. One of the game changers is the shift toward the consumerization of BI tools. As a result, for BI tools to be successfully used by business users (rather than IT departments), the tools need a business model, rather than a data model. One chapter of the book surveys four different types of business modeling. However, even with the existence of a business model for users to express queries, the data that can meet the needs are still captured within a data model. The next chapter on vivification addresses the problem of closing the gap, which is often significant, between the business and the data models. Moreover, Big Data forces BI systems to integrate and consolidate multiple, and often wildly different, data sources. One chapter gives an overview of several integration architectures for dealing with the challenges that need to be overcome. While the book so far focuses on the usual structured relational data, the remaining chapters turn to unstructured data, an ever-increasing and important component of Big Data. One chapter on information extraction describes methods for dealing with the extraction of relations from free text and the web. Finally, BI users need tools to visualize and interpret new and complex types of information in a way that is compelling, intuitive, but accurate. The last chapter gives an overview of information visualization for decision support and text.

This book highlights state-of-the-art research on big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), along with related areas to ensure efficient and Internet-compatible IoT systems. It not only discusses big data security and privacy challenges, but also energy-efficient approaches to improving virtual machine placement in cloud computing environments. Big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) are ultimately two sides of the same coin, yet extracting, analyzing and managing IoT data poses a serious challenge. Accordingly, proper analytics infrastructures/platforms should be used to analyze IoT data. Information technology (IT) allows people to upload, retrieve, store and collect information, which ultimately forms big data. The use of big data analytics has grown tremendously in just the past few years. At the same time, the IoT has entered the public consciousness, sparking people’s imaginations as to what a fully connected world can offer. Further, the book discusses the analysis of real-time big data to derive actionable intelligence in enterprise applications in several domains, such as in industry and agriculture. It explores possible automated solutions in daily life, including structures for smart cities and automated home systems based on IoT technology, as well as health care systems that manage large amounts of data (big data) to improve clinical decisions. The book addresses the security and privacy of the IoT and big data technologies, while also revealing the impact of IoT technologies on several scenarios in smart cities design. Intended as a comprehensive introduction, it offers in-depth analysis and provides scientists, engineers and professionals the latest techniques, frameworks and strategies used in IoT and big data technologies.

A comprehensive textbook on data analysis for business, applied economics and public policy that uses case studies with real-world data.

This, the 37th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains five revised selected regular papers. Topics covered include data security in clouds, privacy languages, probabilistic modelling in linked data integration, business intelligence based on multi-agent systems, collaborative filtering, and prediction accuracy.