Abstract
Many organizations must produce many reports for various reasons. Although this activity could appear simple to carry out, this fact is not at all true: indeed, generating reports requires the collection of possibly large and heterogeneous data sets. Furthermore, different professional figures are involved in the process, possibly with different skills (database technicians, domain experts, employees): the lack of common knowledge and of a unifying framework significantly obstructs the effective and efficient definition and continuous generation of reports. This paper presents a novel framework named RADAR, which is the acronym for “Resilient Application for Dependable Aided Reporting”: the framework has been devised to be a ”bridge” between data and employees in charge of generating reports. Specifically, it builds a common knowledge base in which database administrators and domain experts describe their knowledge about the application domain and the gathered data; this knowledge can be browsed by employees to find out the relevant data to aggregate and insert into reports, while designing report layouts; the framework assists the overall process from data definition to report generation. The paper presents the application scenario and the vision by means of a running example, defines the data model and presents the architecture of the framework.
Highlights
Organizations such as large companies, institutions or government bodies have built powerful information systems to support their business processes and institutional missions
In comparison with our previous work [4], which for the first time gave a presentation of the RADAR Framework, the present paper provides many contributions. (i) The application scenario is clearly described, by exploiting a running example. (ii) The RADAR Data Model is extensively and formally defined in all its aspects. (iii) A complete RADAR Schema is provided for the running example. (iv) The architecture of the RADAR Framework and its components are extensively presented, showing screenshots of the user interfaces to clarify the usage perspective of the framework
The RADAR Schema of the running example is completed by RADAR Rules that are necessary to evaluate those properties in concrete classes that cannot be mapped onto attributes in external tables
Summary
Organizations such as large companies, institutions or government bodies (e.g., central banks, regional and municipal authorities, credit institutions, and so on) have built powerful information systems to support their business processes and institutional missions. The large amount of data to aggregate to produce summaries, as well as the repeated and possibly frequent generation of reports, overseen by employees who usually do not have technical competences in data management, are practical obstacles for organizations Even though they are provided with powerful information systems that can deal with large volumes of data for operational activities, reporting activities are often not supported by software tools in an integrated way.
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