Constructing semantic ontologies for business analytics

ABSTRACT Business analytics (BA) involves defining organization's capabilities and requirements in order to understand how it functions to accomplish its purposes. BA is typically performed to define and validate solutions that are designed to meet organization's business needs, goals or objectives. To pursue this mission, analysts have to collect, analyse and synthesise huge amount of information. In this paper we demonstrate how constructing semantic ontologies can increase the level of automation of BA methods and techniques. This can be achieved by sophisticated semantic data analysis that can help us structure information and obtain birds-eye overview of a given domain. For the case study we take a set of abstracts from the articles presented on CompSysTech'09 conference and use OntoGen tool to semi-automatically construct ontology for the domain. The obtained results indicate that the proposed approach can be effectively used to digest textual information and present it in a more operational form of topic ontology. We argue that such approach can be useful also to generate domain knowledge in the field of BA.