Business intelligence is usually perceived to be associated closely with the corporate world of business. It is common to expect a discussion on business-related activities when one comes across such a title. The papers published in this book, that form a major part of the lectures delivered at the fourth European summer school on business intelligence, however, depart from such a practice and highlight new frontiers of applications where the theme could be put to work.

Though a distinction is not mentioned in the contents, the chapters could be read and analyzed in two different segments: one that covers data analytics from three different case studies drawn extensively from real-life situations, forming the first three chapters, and two, a narration of different learning methodologies and knowledge reuse techniques that could be used for the analytics of large data sets, forming the last two chapters.

The first chapter analyzes epidemics--Chagas disease in particular--affecting people in Europe and most parts of the American continent. The study touches upon many crucial themes as the discussion progresses. For instance, it highlights how loss of biodiversity in plants causes animals to go extinct and how viral vectors host to such animals finally find their way to humans, leading to new epidemics. The Chagas Information Database, designed to track and monitor the disease, makes use of Pohl’s framework for analysis, which has been elaborated upon in detail.

The second chapter describes how the visual analytics approach could be deployed in data sets involving mobile call records for a wide spectrum of uses. After detailing one such instance of visual analytics, the authors point out the visible differences in the lifestyle and organization of economic activities of the Ivory Coast with regard to its cultural activities. The authors thus establish, convincingly, why methods used in European countries should not be applied in countries like the Ivory Coast. The authors also use their analytics to reveal demographic information, patterns of mobility, important events, and places of significance from the data collected, and also list the flow chart that details the sequence of analysis.

The third chapter provides a description of how documents available on the web could be linked together for analysis. The paper explains how a resource description framework could be developed from such linked data and used for querying purposes. The chapter also explores research possibilities for such web documents.

The fourth and fifth chapters are survey papers. The fourth chapter lists possible supervised classification techniques available for pattern recognition and machine learning, which could be effectively deployed in a wide range of applications involving data streams. The concluding chapter is on the classification of knowledge reuse techniques and situations that could be used for enhancing knowledge management.

The book would be an eye-opener to those business schools that confine discussions related to business intelligence within the boundaries of commercial corporate activities. It shows how the theme could be effectively used in a wide range of cases, along with some of the latest emerging techniques available for conducting innovative analytics.