We discuss the novel problem of supporting analytical business intelligence queries over web-based textual content, e.g., BI-style reports based on 100.000’s of documents from an ad-hoc web search result. Neither conventional search engines nor conventional Business Intelligence and ETL tools address this problem, which lies at the intersection of their capabilities. This application is an exciting challenge that should appeal to and benefit from several research communities, most notably, the database, text analytics and distributed system worlds. E.g., to provide fast answers for such queries, cloud computing techniques need to be incorporated with text analytics, data cleansing, query processing and query refinement methods. However, the envisioned path for OLAP-style query processing over textual web data may take a long time to mature. Two recent developments have the potential to become key components of such an ad-hoc analysis platform: significant improvements in cloud computing query languages and advances in self-supervised information extraction techniques. In this talk, I will give an informative and practical look at the underlying research challenges in supporting "Web-Scale Business Analytics" applications with a focus on its key components and will highlight recent projects.

Dr. Alexander Löser is Research Scientist with Technische Universität Berlin. Before, as a Post-doc at the IBM Almaden Research Center and member of the AVATAR project, Alexander investigated and developed search engines for email search and for searching the IBM intranet. Later he joined SAP Research as Research Scientist. He initiated the work on text analytics for SAP’s primer community platform 'SDN', that later became a major research focus for the lab. Alexander’s current research focuses on planning, optimizing and executing OLAP queries over web-based text data in elastic and distributed execution platforms, such as Hadoop. Alexander published on international conferences and journals including WWW, ISWC, JSAC or JWS and has served on program committees of these and many other conferences. His work on the Avatar Semantic Search System with IBM Research was acknowledged in the Computer World Horizon Awards 2006. Alexander has technically led, managed and successfully delivered on numerous projects funded by European Commission.