Business Intelligence and Semantics

Introduction
Services
Solutions
About xplore+

Business Intelligence, a story well-known

Today, undeniably, Business Intelligence (BI) has taken a key place in your enterprise. Be it a small or large company, reports, dashboards, metrics or cubes are used in almost every aspect of your business. We use them in order to monitor, steer and plan. They are important drivers of the business value we create and the new value we are constantly seeking for.

What about Semantics?

Business Semantics are the answers to the "what does it mean" and "where does it come from" questions we ask ourselves when using BI. What does an entity mean? Where does an entity fit into the process, into our company and... into the world. How is it linked? Where is it linked? Business Semantics provide context and help to increase relevance. The upcoming generation of the Web, the Semantic Web, provides a new breed of Semantic Technologies that help you to master data in all its forms.

More about

Business Intelligence

Semantic Technologies

xploreplus quick links

Services

Software

Open data

Data, wherever it resides in your company, must be opened and made available for analysis, reporting, mining, etc. Unopened data is of no use and risks to be loss of money. The more you know your companies data, the more value you can create, the more competitive you will be.

Data should be open to as many users as possible and as allowed. A big variety of users assures different perspectives, different angles from which the data is looked at and maximizes the benefit of it. This implies next data "abilities" to be in place:

Accessibility
Availability
Understandability
Visibility
Operability

This is what xplore+ stands for; this is our vision in a nutshell. We translate this vision into software and services. As a data integration and solutions company we focus on one of the major BI players, IBM Cognos. The toolset we provide makes it possible to open data outside the standard BI environments. BI mashups and integration are a key to success in achieving maximum return on investment of opening your companies data.

Business Intelligence & Semantics... building blocks towards open data

They are a perfect match in helping you to increase performance, tap new value and being competitive. We offer a broad experience and thorough knowledge, as well technical as high level, in both domains. Based on this fundamental experience and knowledge, we combine services and software that help you in moving forward. We share with you our vision, making sure you pick the right building blocks and plot out the right lines towards success.

Services

Business Intelligence

Back End

Data Warehousing. Combining technical skills and a broad business and industry experience, we excel in designing, building and maintaining small Data Marts to a corporate DWH. Our preferred vendor for implementing back end processes is Informatica.

Front End

Reporting, Dashboarding, Scorecarding and Analytical Applications. As a center of excellence within the BI domain we focus on 2 major vendors:

IBM Cognos
Oracle

Business Semantics

Semantic Technologies. xploreplus is about enabling Semantic Web Standards such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL in your existing performance management environment.

SharePoint

SharePoint DWH Integration. We help you in using SharePoint as an integrated source and target for your DWH. We provide the knowledge and tools to read from and write to SharePoint using ETL or a custom designed toolset. We have experience in creating real time DWH processes using SharePoint.

Solutions

CoMetReporter - Cognos BI 8 lineage

CoMetReporter is a tool to better manage and maintain your Cognos BI 8.x metadata. The software enables you to query and search your Cognos Connection's metadata such as Folder, Query, Report, View, Shortcut, ... properties in an easy way. It also includes metadata reporting of your Framework Manager model and links it to you reports and queries swift and easy. This way you are able to make a top to bottom mapping of your report's data items to the originating database column! Answer all your questions about your environment, which reports are scheduled when, which reports are being send by mail and to whom, perform impact analysis tasks quickly, list and export all this information, and so on. [Click to enlarge the diagram on the right]

CoMetReporter Full Product Overview

CoReDispatcher - Cognos BI 8 Report Capture

This easy to use tool dispatches your Cognos reports, saved on a physical location on the server or other shared location, to fileservers, your corporate Content Management System such as SharePoint, Documentum, etc., an FTP server, ... Simply configure which reports or reportviews to capture based on several possible conditions and send them to a target. [Click to enlarge the diagram on the right]

Product Details

CoMetReporter Full Product Overview

What?
It is a metadata reporting layer on top of Cognos 8 BI.

Reads Framework Manager model data.
Reads Cognos Connection metadata.
Loads metadata into to a relational database.
Provides a semantic layer on top of this metadata.

It's not the Cognos Audit package, it's in addition of Cognos Audit.

Who is the target audience?
CometReporter is intended for:

the Cognos BI 8 system administrator;
the business analyst;
the Framework Manager modeler;
and the report author.

What can we use it for?
When working in Cognos Connection in an environment that is intensively used, we are often faced with questions regarding the metadata of reports, folders, views, and all other objects within Cognos Connection. Questions we ask ourselves every day but for which Cognos does not offer an easy to use and straight forward way of answering it. We need to browse through the portal open different screens and view the properties to find answers. Using CoMetReporter you can easily browse through the metadata of Cognos Connection and all its objects using for instance Query Studio!

Examples of the things we are looking for in Cognos Connection:

Which reports/jobs are scheduled when?
Which output formats are being used?
Which reports are bursted?
Which reports are being mailed? To whom?
Where do reportviews reside for which reports?
How do packages link to reports?
Which reports fail when being executed?
You want to keep track of report execution time beyond the track of Cognos?
...

A business analyst or Cognos report author can have questions regarding the reports hosted on the Cognos system. Next questions can pop up when modifying reports, changing the model, looking for objects and items used on reports etc.:

Which data items are used on a report?
Which hyperlinks, images are being used?
Which filters are being used on which reports?
What calculations are being used?
Which prompts are being used?
How do data items map back to the model?
...

Besides all the metadata related to your Cognos Connection environment, CoMetReporter also extracts, transforms and loads the Framework Manager model's metadata. This way you are able to report on items used in your model and you can automate specific documentation tasks:

Automatically generate a mapping starting from the database layer, over the business layer to the presentation layer within your Framework Manager model up to data items used within a report.
Perform bulk impact analysis when modifying your semantic layer.
Automate release notes when publishing a new package to production by comparing the current version against the previous version.
Create a package structure report for easy discussion with the business users about how the package should be structured in a logical way.
...

Semantic Layer entities in CoMetReporter v1.0

Cognos Connection:

Folders;
Report Studio Reports;
Query Studio Reports;
Jobs;
Portalpages;
Schedules;
Shortcuts;
URLs;
Run History;
Report Run History.

Framework Manager:

Model objects;
Datasources;
Query Items;
Query Subjects;
Calculations;
Filters.

Technical Features

Runs on:

Windows XP;
Win Server 2000;
Win Server 2003;
Win Server 2008.

RAM Required:

2x size XML file being parsed.

Supported Cognos Versions:

Cognos BI 8.x

Next databases are supported for storing the data:

SQL Server;
Oracle.

CoMetReporter connects using ODBC to the CoMetReporter's database. It can be scheduled using commandline for use in scripts, other applications, batch files, etc.

About xploreplus

xploreplus is a data integration solutions provider. We deliver technical expertise through services and software.

We focus on:

Business Intelligence: Reporting, Analysis, Dashboarding and Scorecarding
Customization of standard Performance Management solutions
Visualization using Rich Internet Applications technologies
Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL)
Datawarehousing (Design, Build, Maintain)
Business Semantics
Semantic Technologies

Our team of highly skilled professionals is certified in IBM Cognos BI, IBM XML, Java. This mix of skills results in creative solutions and endless possibilities that go beyond the mainstream service providers active in these domains. On top of that our team is certified Prince II project management. This way xploreplus is able to offer a full end-to-end package to our clients.