NSERC Business Intelligence Network (2009-2014)

Challenge

The goal of NSERC BIN is to create an innovation platform for pre-competitive research in Business Intelligence in Canada. NSERC BIN aims to enhance Canadian business competitiveness through the development of intelligent data management and decision-making solutions. Business Intelligence has to move from the silos of finance, accounting, marketing, customer care and inventory management to become an integral part of business operations, driving business decisions using information sources across the entire corporation. Complex organizations are in need of knowledge-management solutions that are more comprehensive than the existing patchwork of data and content management systems currently available. There is a critical need for a business knowledge management architecture where corporate objectives, processes, metadata and data are linked through organizational and operational objectives.

Network Structure

The NSERC BIN research team consists of 15 investigators at seven universities (University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, Carleton University, Dalhousie University, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto and University of Waterloo). Investigators are working in partnership with researchers at a number of organizations including SAP, IBM, iAnywhere, Palomino, IC-Agency, Bell Canada and Zerofootprint.

Renée J. Miller, Professor and Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems, University of Toronto, is the network Principal Investigator and Network Scientific Director. Professor Raymond Ng, University of British Columbia, is the Network Associate Director. The network research is organized under four theme areas: Strategy and Policy Management (led by John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto); Capitalizing on Document Assets (led by Frank Tompa, University of Waterloo); Adaptive Data Cleaning (led by Leopoldo Bertossi, Carleton University); and Data Integration (led by Iluju Kiringa, University of Ottawa).

Research Objectives

Specific NSERC BIN research objectives include:

• development of an end-user-oriented business-level modeling framework where non-technical business users will be able to understand, use and evolve business schemas;
• development of new solutions for specifying and discovering mappings between business and data schemas, and for translating business schema policies to conceptual schema constraints;
• development of new, adaptive solutions for business-model-driven data integration;
• development of techniques for extracting and using structured information from a wide range of document types;
• development of tools and technology that allow unstructured data to be used seamlessly in support of decision making; and
• development of adaptive and flexible languages and computational solutions
  for specifying and verifying data quality constraints and data cleaning solutions.

Outcomes

The socio-economic benefits expected from NSERC BIN’s findings include accelerated market adoption of research innovations, enhanced productivity and effectiveness of Business Intelligence (BI) providers, and the creation of highly trained BI personnel. Established in 2009, NSERC BIN is funded for five years by NSERC with a grant of $5 million and contributions (cash and in-kind) of about $1 million collectively from partners and participating universities.

Contact

Leslie Dolman
NSERC BIN Director of Partner Relations
Tel.: 416-946-3076
E-mail: leslie.dolman@utoronto.ca