A platform for situational awareness in operational BI

Enterprises are being swamped with data, and much of it is unstructured in origin. As these data volumes for unstructured data increase, there is a need to extract more value from them. For the purpose of gaining business insight, besides traditional text mining, we need capabilities to correlate unstructured data emanating from different sources. An important instance of this is the capability to correlate streaming unstructured web data with internal document data in near real time, which can give enterprises significant tremendous competitive advantage by enabling them to be aware of external events that can affect their business operations. This situational awareness gives business managers the opportunity to make informed operational decisions before it is too late. SIE-OBI is a platform being developed at HP Labs that responds to this need. In this paper, we describe SIE-OBI and illustrate its use via an application that provides awareness of events described in news articles that could affect the contracts of an enterprise. We present the main components of the platform architecture and illustrate their functionality to our contractual situational awareness scenario.