BI is carried out in a variety of industries, from financial services and insurance, to media and communication. BI is a prerequisite for effective risk measurement, management and mitigation in business processes in all and more of these sectors.

MUSING multi-industry BI tools will ensure that all the designed solutions are effectively usable across industries and, in particular, can be applied in three strategic vertical domains.

• Finance, through the development and validation of next generation (Basel II and beyond) semantic-based BI solutions, with particular reference to Credit Risk Management and Access to credit for enterprises, especially SMEs. There is a general concern that the new international Accord on Capital Adequacy (Basel II, by which banks from all over the world are required to develop new and more sensitive risk management systems), will cause banks to redirect credit away from distressed markets and from SMEs that might not have enough human resources for collecting and storing the requested complex information. This could be disastrous for SMEs and for Financial Institutions, and to prevent it from happening, the banks’ Basel II-compliant Financial Risk Management Systems (FRMS) need to gain valuable information from other channels, to evaluate the financial health of SMEs (through rating/scoring systems) as is the case for large enterprises.
  
  - MUSING semantic technology extracts information from unexploited structured and unstructured data (in various languages), organising this information into knowledge that is relevant for company ratings.  
  
  - MUSING produces a ready-to-use, standardised representation of knowledge (ontology) that FRMS can immediately recognise and manipulate, thus reducing latency between information collection and decision-making. 
  
  - MUSING also contributes to advancing FRMS towards the development of integrated risk management solutions – fed by semantic-based BI modules – by applying statistical reasoning techniques on knowledge automatically acquired by the MUSING semantic extraction tools from heterogeneous data sources.
  
  Overall, qualitative information, describing e.g. intangible assets, is merged with other types of information, qualitative and/or quantitative, which are ignored in other risk assessment procedures.
  

• Internationalisation, through the development and validation of next generation semantic-based internationalisation platforms. Supporting internationalisation of SMEs is a vital aspect in the context of global competition. Trust-based business co-operation is moving from local aggregations to an international dimension, thereby needing highly sophisticated business intelligence services. Currently, the high price point of punctual, personalised services of this kind prevents, de facto, many SMEs from internationalisation.
  
  - The MUSING output will consider identifying, capturing, representing and localising trusted knowledge as part of the company’s internationalisation process.
  

• Operational Risk Management, through the development and validation of semantic-driven knowledge systems for measurement and mitigation tools, with particular reference to IT operational risks faced by IT-intensive organisations. There is a need for flexible operational risk management systems, able to synthesise, share and present large amounts of loss data, as well as to identify sources of operational risk, especially related to IT systems.
  
  - The MUSING semantic-based BI platform helps in measuring and controlling the operational risks of large enterprises, as well as SMEs, impacting positively on the community, both in terms of service levels and costs.