DIANE (Domain Informatics Analytics for Enterprise): a smartly integrated enterprise platform for consumable informatics

Large enterprises possess data of different data types, coming from diversified, silos data sources that are critical to the business. Although applying informatics technologies to these data can drastically bring benefits to the business, the technology adoption is low. IBM Canada Software Lab CAS Research started a research portfolio in 2011 with the goal of understanding of enterprise's consumption of informatics technologies through real enterprise case studies in order to find out the consume-ability issues and barriers of technology adoption. Two enterprise domains were chosen due to their business needs, namely, the enterprise domain of IBM Customer Support and the enterprise domain of Personalized Medicine. These scopes are ideal due to the following reasons. Firstly, the two domains are very disjoint. This allows opportunities for observations and abstractions of generic problem and solution patterns. Secondly, both domains have large data sets of different data sources and types kept in silo, which can be made available for the studies. Thirdly, both domains have data experts who are willing to share their experience. When enterprises consume informatics technologies, they are first and foremost oriented from the perspectives of the enterprises' domain, and less oriented on the informatics technologies. For example, they are not cognitively aware if they have big data problems or not. When they have a business questions to ask, they know not whether their question should be a predictive analytics query, an information retrieval query or a semantic reasoning question. Therefore, the term "informatics" is chosen and used instead of "big data" or "analytics". The term "informatics" refers to the study of the representation, structure, algorithms, processing, behaviour and interactions of information in systems [1]. Its scope is comprehensive to include analytics, information retrieval, semantic reasoning and data mining as its proper subsets. Empirical experience of two scenarios was presented in this workshop to further define functional and system requirements and future research problem statements. In addressing the above concerns, we proposed Domain Informatics Analytics for Enterprise (DIANE). DIANE is an informatics platform with informatics services accessible through unified, simple-to-use, always-on and device adaptive user interfaces. It acts in a manner that is agnostic to the diversity of data types and data source locations, with queries expressible in natural language through pre-defined, reserved vocabularies. However, queries are agnostic to informatics types (such as analytics, information retrieval, semantic reasoning or data mining). By leveraging a data acquisition framework, subject matter experts (SME) can systematically and prescriptively plug in trustworthy and relevant data of all types and sources for the domain of concern. Such platform is enabled with visualizations and interactions of query results with high precision of cognitive performance. The two studies also evaluated the consumability of building such domain oriented informatics platform by IT professionals and consuming informatics services from such informatics platforms by business users for regular enterprise operations.