On data integration and data mining for developing business intelligence

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) allows a corporation's executives to acquire a better understanding of their customers, the market, supply and resources, and competitors in order to make effective strategic decisions. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations such as reporting, online analytical processing, business performance management, competitive intelligence, benchmarking, and predictive analytics. Web Services technologies responded quickly to help such evolution and in many situations the Web Services application is driving businesses and dictating a new way of doing business. Web information usually contains multimedia data with unstructured fashions. Through the effective analysis of company's Web information, we could make effective market analysis, compare customer feedback on similar products, discover the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors, retain highly valuable customers, and make smart business decisions. In this paper, we discuss two case studies on data integration and data mining. The first case is for the traditional data analytics using relational database techniques such as Oracle database and Cognos BI tool for integrating and mining a company's web site. The second case is for multimedia data analytics using Monago database and Pentaho BI tool for integrating and mining multimedia data presented in a company's web site. We compare both cases in aspects of Data Integration, Metadata, Query Performance and Data Analytics. Finally, we present experimental results for using the above data mining techniques and tools to better understand features of each customer group and develop customized customer reward programs.