Consolidation of BI Efforts in the LOD Era for African Context

During the last few years, we assist to spectacular increase of Business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) software revenue in the Middle East and Africa (MENA) totaled \$245 million in 2014, a 12 percent increase from 2013 revenue of \$219 million, according to Gartner, Inc. The Linked Open Data (LOD) era will contribute positively in keeping this dynamic. LOD datasets complete internal sources by new and relevant information for decision making. This integration in the data warehousing landscape has become a necessity. Recent studies conducted mainly in Europe have been proposed for this direction. Similarly, to first studies of conventional DW design, LOD driven approaches focused on data issues (like integration and multidimensionality) and ignored the importance of functional and non-functional requirements. This issue is a precondition for the success of BI&A projects in Africa. This continent is living an interesting phenomenon related to the multiplication of Open Data initiatives. Based on our experience on developing BI&A projects, our origin and knowing the European and African contexts, we propose a requirement-driven approach for designing semantic data warehouses from internal and LOD datasets, by considering requirements incrementally. All phases of our approach is formalized allowing a traceability of requirements. Experiments are conducted that show the impact of incorporating exploratory requirements at the schema level and at the instance level of the target warehouse. A case study analyzing book sales transactions is given.