Dataspaces enhancing decision support systems in clouds

Business Organizations increasingly rely on publicly accessible communication infrastructures such as the Internet and Cloud computing, in order to manage their internal processes and offer their services to finan- cial actors, businesses and ordinary people worldwide. However, little attention has been paid to embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) philosophy for supporting business analysts in evaluating effectiveness and relevance of business information or finding patterns to direct them on more sources of data. This paper proposes a flexible architectural framework for modelling application services useful in supporting business decision processes. This architecture goes beyond the static schemas offered by data warehouse systems as it supports including data gathered from heterogeneous sources and added-value services offered in Internet or provided by Cloud infrastructures. Central to this architecture is the concept of dataspace as a reference model for structuring information relevant to a particular organization, regardless of its format and location. A case study of a real world implementation is presented dealing with supporting decisions in the real estate domain.