Enabling Better Decisions Through Quality-Aware Reports in Business Intelligence Applications

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions commonly aim at assisting decision-making processes by providing a comprehensive view over a company’s core business data and suitable abstractions thereof. Decision-making based on BI solutions therefore builds on the assumption that providing users with targeted, problem-specific fact data enables them to make informed and, hence, better decisions in their everyday businesses. In order to really provide users with all the necessary details to make informed decisions, we however believe that – in addition to conventional reports – it is essential to also provide users with information about the quality, i.e. with quality metadata, regarding the data from which reports are generated. Identifying a lack of support for quality metadata management in conventional BI solutions, in this paper we propose the idea of quality-aware reports and a possible architecture for quality-aware BI able to involve the users themselves into the quality metadata management process by soliciting and exploiting user feedback.