Benefits of Ontologies in Real Time Data Access

Next generation Business Intelligence systems requires flexible and on-time access to enterprise's data. This paper highlights the importance of a data integration layer in a Business Intelligence system and the benefits that the use of an ontology as data description formalism and query interface, can bring to the system. In particular we focus on the aspects of data mapping and ontology enrichment, giving a general overview of the problem. We introduce also BT Data Foundry platform that has been implemented by Intelligent Systems Research Centre of BT Exact (British Telecom) as a method to provide the Business Intelligence system with a common data access layer. We provide also an outline of the solution to data mapping and ontology enrichment problems, based on semantic bridges and formal concept analysis (FCA). We use a normalization layer based on heuristic to reduce the terms space.