The CUBIST Project: Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies

As a preface to this Special 'CUBIST' Edition of the International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies IJIIT, this article describes the European Framework Seven Combining and Unifying Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies CUBIST project, which ran from October 2010 to September 2013. The project aimed to combine the best elements of traditional BI with the newer, semantic, technologies of the Sematic Web, in the form of the Resource Description Framework RDF, and Formal Concept Analysis FCA. CUBIST's purpose was to provide end-users with "conceptually relevant and user friendly visual analytics" to allow them to explore their data in new ways, discovering hidden meaning and solving hitherto difficult problems. To this end, three of the partners in CUBIST were use-cases: recruitment consultancy, computational biology and the space industry. Each use-case provided their own requirements and problems that were finally addressed by the prototype CUBIST visual-analytics developed in the project.