Business Intelligence Applications and the Web Models, Systems and Technologies

Over the last decade, we have witnessed an increasing use of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that allow business people to query, understand, and analyze their business data in order to make better decisions. Traditionally, BI applications allow management and decision-makers to acquire useful knowledge about the performance and problems of business from the data of their organization by means of a variety of technologies, such as data warehousing, data mining, business performance management, OLAP, and periodical business reports. Research in these areas has produced consolidated solutions, techniques, and methodologies, and there are a variety of commercial products available that are based on these results. Business Intelligence Applications and the Web: Models, Systems and Technologies summarizes current research advances in BI and the Web, emphasizing research solutions, techniques, and methodologies which combine both areas in the interest of building better BI solutions. This comprehensive collection aims to emphasize the interconnections that exist among the two research areas and to highlight the benefits of combined use of BI and Web practices, which so far have acted rather independently, often in cases where their joint application would have been sensible.

Marta Elena Zorrilla Pantaleón is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Cantabria (Spain). She earned her Bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Engineering and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cantabria in 1994 and 2001, respectively. She has participated in and managed more than 20 research projects, most of them with companies and she is author of a database book and more than 40 works published in international journals, books and conferences. She is an active reviewer of several international journals and conferences (DSS, IJCSA, IEEE-Education, IEEE-RITA, SCI, BEWEB, etc.). Her research interests are the design and development of Information Systems and intelligent systems for companies and, inside the educational area, the application of data mining techniques and OLAP technologies in order to analyse and improve Web-based learning sites.

Jose-Norberto Mazón is Assistant Professor at the Department of Software and Computing Systems in the University of Alicante (Spain). He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Alicante (Spain) within the Lucentia Research Group. He has published several papers about data warehouses and requirement engineering in national and international workshops and conferences, (such as DAWAK, ER, DOLAP, BNCOD, JISBD and so on) and in several journals such as Decision Support Systems (DSS), SIGMOD Record or Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE). He has also been co-organizer of the International Workshop on Business Intelligence and the Web (BEWEB 2010) and the International Workshop on The Web and Requirements Engineering (WeRE 2010). His research interests are: business intelligence, design of data warehouses, multidimensional databases, requirement engineering and model driven development.

Óscar Ferrández is a postdoctoral researcher in the BioMedical Informatics department at the University of Utah (USA). He got his Ph.D in Computational Linguistics at the University of Alicante (Spain) within the Natural Language Processing and Information Systems research group. He has publications in international journals (such as Information Sciences, Data and Knowledge Engineering and Information Processing and Management) as well as communications in relevant conferences and workshops related to his research field. He has been involved in several national and European research projects together with other international research institutions. He is an active member and reviewer of several international journals and conferences. His research interests are focused on human system interaction; ontologies and Semantic Web; machine learning; knowledge discovering; and natural language processing and its application to clinical records.

Irene Garrigós is an Assistant Professor and post-doc researcher at the University of Alicante, (Spain), from which she holds a PhD and a Master's in Computer Science. She has published several papers in national and international workshops, conferences and journals (such as ICWE, ER, WISE, APWEB, JISBD, Information and Software Technologies, Journal of Web Engineering and so on). Dr. Garrigós has served as a Program Committee member of several workshops and conferences such as ER, JISBD, WISM, MDA, FPUML, UWA and has served as assistant referee in several international conferences such as WWW and ICWE. She has done research stays in Belgium (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and the Netherlands (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven). Her research interests are: Web engineering, personalization, model driven development, requirement engineering, Web and business intelligence and adaptive systems.