Integration with IBM Cognos BI

To help you gain deeper insight into analyzed content, you can generate reports that contain analysis statistics about content in Watson Explorer Content Analytics collections and view the reports with IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence analytical tools. You can also export crawled documents, analyzed documents, or documents that match the query conditions directly to an IBM Cognos BI relational database.

IBM Cognos BI is an integrated business intelligence suite that provides a wide range of functions to help business analysts make effective business decisions by analyzing data and viewing or creating analytical reports.

Typically, IBM Cognos BI helps business users understand structured data that is represented as fields, such as records in relational database tables. Watson Explorer Content Analytics extracts information from unstructured data, which is usually in free text format. Because this extracted data can be treated as structured data, IBM Cognos BI can consume information from Watson Explorer Content Analytics.

You can pass information from Watson Explorer Content Analytics to IBM Cognos BI in two ways:

Export documents with content analysis results

By using the export functions in the administration console or content analytics miner, you can export documents into star-schema tables in a relational database. You can then run online analytical processing (OLAP) queries against the reports to do a more in-depth analysis of both structured and unstructured data.

Generate reports that contain content mining results

By using the content analytics miner, you can explore different facets of the analyzed content in a collection. To analyze the results in different ways, you can generate a report that can be opened with IBM Cognos BI. The report is available in the IBM Cognos BI portal page, which makes the report easy to share among users.

When business users view the report, they can print the report, save the report in PDF format, edit the report with Cognos Report Studio, and do other actions. By clicking a link that is provided in the report, users can open the content analytics miner with the same search conditions that were used to create the report. This feature helps analysts explore documents, for example, before making business decisions.

In the content analytics miner, use the Reports view to see a list of all reports. When you select a report in the list, you can open it with IBM Cognos BI. You can also copy the URL for the report, and then paste the URL into another document or email to share the report with other users.

To automate the export of documents into a relational database and to enable users to generate analytical reports, you can run wizards when you configure a content analytics collection in the Watson Explorer Content Analytics administration console to specify your export and report preferences. You must also grant users the authority to export documents from an application and create IBM Cognos BI reports. You must set up the integration between Watson Explorer Content Analytics and IBM Cognos BI before you run the wizards.

For the latest information about the version of IBM Cognos BI that are supported by Watson Explorer Content Analytics, see the supported data sources.

A guided tour can show you how to set up the integration between Watson Explorer Content Analytics and IBM Cognos BI, export analyzed data, and import the data into IBM Cognos BI reports, databases, and models. The tour also shows you how to use IBM Cognos BI to do deeper analysis of the imported data. To view this tour, see Integrating IBM Cognos Business Intelligence with Watson Explorer Content Analytics.