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Applying model-driven engineering to the development of Rich Internet Applications for Business Intelligence

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Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) applications have been gradually ported to the Web in search of a global platform for the consumption and publication of data and services. On the Internet, apart from techniques for data/knowledge management, BI Web applications need interfaces with a high level of interoperability (similar to the traditional desktop interfaces) for the visualisation of data/knowledge. In some cases, this has been provided by Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The development of these BI RIAs is a process traditionally performed manually and, given the complexity of the final application, it is a process which might be prone to errors. The application of model-driven engineering techniques can reduce the cost of development and maintenance (in terms of time and resources) of these applications, as they demonstrated by other types of Web applications. In the light of these issues, the paper introduces the Sm4RIA-B methodology, i.e., a model-driven methodology for the development of RIA as BI Web applications. In order to overcome the limitations of RIA regarding knowledge management from the Web, this paper also presents a new RIA platform for BI, called RI@BI, which extends the functionalities of traditional RIAs by means of Semantic Web technologies and B2B techniques. Finally, we evaluate the whole approach on a case study—the development of a social network site for an enterprise project manager.

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Notes

  1. Davenport (2000) presented an overview of the Enterprise systems, as well as his predictions about the future of these systems. Some of the aspects he mentioned are still challenges in this decade, e.g., the use of techniques for knowledge management (Barjis et al. 2011).

  2. Although it is a common term in this scenario, the Software & Information Industry Association provided one of the first definitions of this concept. See (SIIA 2001).

  3. http://www.data.gov/

  4. The definition of this type of service can be found on http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SPARQL_endpoint. Moreover, a list of the available services can be found on http://thedatahub.org/.

  5. OOH4RIA is a methodology that supports the RIA development lifecycle specifying the RIA components by means of two server-side models (i.e., Domain and Navigation) and two RIA presentation models (i.e., Presentation and Orchestration).

  6. Prefixes are used with elements imported from other ontologies. The prefixes “sioc__” and “foaf__” respectively correspond to the namespace of the ontologies defined in the Source view.

  7. Xpand. Eclipsepedia. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xpand.

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Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under the FPU program (ref. AP2007-03076) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the SONRIA project (ref. TIN2010-15789). The authors would also like to thank the University of Alicante for the economic support given through the DIMENRIA research project (ref. GRE10-23).

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  1. Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Jesús M. Hermida, Santiago Meliá, Andrés Montoyo & Jaime Gómez

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  1. Jesús M. Hermida
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  2. Santiago Meliá
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Correspondence to Jesús M. Hermida.

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Hermida, J.M., Meliá, S., Montoyo, A. et al. Applying model-driven engineering to the development of Rich Internet Applications for Business Intelligence. Inf Syst Front 15, 411–431 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-012-9402-9

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