Towards Integrated Model-Driven Engineering Approach to Business Intelligence

This paper presents a vision for an integrated and comprehensive Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) framework for Business Intelligence (BI), called BIG - Business Intelligence Generator. It starts from two observations: (i) MDE is a common approach to implement parts of a BI system and (ii) existing MDE approaches to BI are heterogeneous, not always methodologically and technically aligned, and sometimes even overlooking entire layers of the BI systems. This paper objectifies the heterogeneity of existing MDE approaches, extends on the problems it is likely to lead to, and calls for a proper end-to-end MDE-BI approach, with each layer of the MDE-BI architecture capable of proper communication and exchange with the next one. As a response, the BIG framework is introduced, under the form of a vision. The paper describes the BIG framework in general and discusses for each of its modules the benefits of the proposal. Future works required to fulfill the vision are also discussed, suggesting new avenues for research around BI and MDE.