Grid-based Business Intelligence Service Platform

Business intelligence (BI) is an emerging field in computer application for large enterprise business. The task of business intelligence is to analyze huge amounts of enterprise data with various artificial intelligence algorithms (e.g. clustering, association rules, and classification) in order to discover special characteristics of business objects (e.g. providers, customers and products) or mine potential useful business patterns, so that the enterprise can gain additional profits and competition advantages.A usual business intelligence process includes several phrases: ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load), Data Warehousing, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing), Data Mining, and Reporting. Each of those phrases often involves extraordinary large volumes (especially for large enterprise applications) of data processing and computation, which accounts for the unusual high complexity of business intelligence process. Data mining and knowledge discovery is a key phrase of business intelligence process, during which various machine learning algorithms are applied to the transformed structured enterprise data to discover useful results that cannot be clearly seen by the enterprise user directly from the original data. Since the amount of data to process is so large and the algorithms are often very time-consuming, business intelligence application usually requires high-performance hardware configurations and fine-tuned resource utilization is a very important consideration when designing business intelligence software.Business intelligence is more than 10 years old in both research and industry fields. However, its application did not become widely recognized until recently due to above difficulties. Existing BI software are often too naive to resolve enterprise problems or, because BI concepts are so professional, too hard for the user to operate. Another problem for existing BI software is that BI applications are so enterprise-specific that each enterprise has its own BI application software, causing the unconceivable difficulties in BI software development.To address such difficulties, we designed and developed a general business intelligence service platform based on grid computation technology. Our initiative idea is to construct a universal platform providing business intelligence services for various kinds of enterprise users. Such a universal platform may offer enterprise users atomic services for business intelligence applications. The enterprise users can utilize the atomic services to implement application level tasks to analyze their own enterprise data. The enterprise users will enjoy the on-demand service experience without extra wasted budget paid for some useless functions in traditional BI software applications. Additionally, grid computation architecture provides the facilities to integrate underlying computation resources and maximize the utilization of resources as well as computation ability. By translating the specific business intelligence task into the basic atomic tasks, all kinds of business intelligence tasks can be implemented by a unified development process in a consolidated BI framework, unlike traditional BI software applications with much of repetitive work in them. Besides, a general service platform has best scalability and reliability. It is very easy to add server clusters or increase the memory to improve the whole service performance for all applications.Grid computation is a new concept in distributed computation field, which aims to provide infrastructure for distributed computation to integrate available distributed computation resources and offer the users on-demand service for utilizing the resources. Grid computation field is still growing and not very mature. At present web service technology plays an important role in many grid computation applications. We use web service technology to construct our business intelligence services.We also developed a sample client application to use the services offered by the platform. The sample client is based on a database for ERP application.