Information (Nov 2021)

RADAR: Resilient Application for Dependable Aided Reporting

  • Antonia Azzini,
  • Nicola Cortesi,
  • Giuseppe Psaila

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/info12110463
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 11
p. 463

Abstract

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Many organizations must produce many reports for various reasons. Although this activity could appear simple to carry out, this fact is not at all true: indeed, generating reports requires the collection of possibly large and heterogeneous data sets. Furthermore, different professional figures are involved in the process, possibly with different skills (database technicians, domain experts, employees): the lack of common knowledge and of a unifying framework significantly obstructs the effective and efficient definition and continuous generation of reports. This paper presents a novel framework named RADAR, which is the acronym for “Resilient Application for Dependable Aided Reporting”: the framework has been devised to be a ”bridge” between data and employees in charge of generating reports. Specifically, it builds a common knowledge base in which database administrators and domain experts describe their knowledge about the application domain and the gathered data; this knowledge can be browsed by employees to find out the relevant data to aggregate and insert into reports, while designing report layouts; the framework assists the overall process from data definition to report generation. The paper presents the application scenario and the vision by means of a running example, defines the data model and presents the architecture of the framework.

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