Business Intelligence (BI) can be described as “the interactive process of analysing and exploring information to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions”. In this sense, business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analysing data in order to help users make better business decisions and to improve both the timeliness and the quality of information.

The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors that affect a business; therefore, in depth knowledge about factors such as customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations are crucial to make effective and good quality business decisions. To support and automate this traditionally human-intensive work, mostly dealing with collecting data, and distilling information from large amounts of heterogeneous and unstructured documentation, MUSING developed a new generation of BI tools and modules founded on semantic-based knowledge and content systems

The motivation for a new generation of BI tools is manifold and can be found in new financial regulations, the increasing push for internationalisation, the stronger need for information security management solutions, and the need for systems to manage operational risk.