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Monday, October 15, 2007

Pentaho Makes Open Source BI Semantic

The business intelligence software market is all about enabling business
users to make sense of their data. But sometimes the data's complexity
can make it a daunting task. Open source BI vendor Pentaho claims it
has a solution in the new Pentaho Business Intelligence 1.6, which
provides a semantic metadata layer. Lance Walter, vice president of
marketing at Pentaho: "Pentaho has been marching down the path of making
open source business intelligence easier to use. The latest release is
a critical next step in that it adds an open source business intelligence
metadata layer that lets users build reports with terms like 'customers,'
'products' and 'sales' and insulates them from the underlying database
structure and schema." The BI metadata layer is centrally maintained
by an administrator that can create a map of terms. Those terms are then
served up to users in an AJAX-based thin-client interface so they can
self-serve and create their own reports. Metadata is exposed via XML
using the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM), an open-industry standard
format for the expression of metadata that Informatica, Business Objects
and others already support in their BI tools. Pentaho is built natively
around the CWM, so it would be easy for customers to integrate with
metadata they may already have in other tools. Pentaho spent a lot of
time looking at where other BI solutions had failed with their metadata
implementation in order to make sure that Pentaho didn't make the same
mistakes. The standards-based approach is one that so far is serving
Pentaho well and is why it isn't part of the Open Solutions Alliance
(OSA), an effort that aims to make open source solutions interoperate
with each other. Open source BI vendor Jaspersoft plays a large role
in the organization.

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