Design of an innovative IT platform for analytics knowledge management

摘要

An organisation wishing to conduct data analytics to support day-to-day decision making often needs a system to help analysts represent and maintain knowledge about research variables, datasets or analytical models, and effectively determine the best combination to use when solving the problem at hand. Often, such knowledge is not explicitly captured by the organisation. To address this problem, this paper presents the design of an innovative Information Technology (IT) platform which enables data sharing between different analytics models and provides the ability to extend or customise models or data sources without necessarily involving the analysts who created them. It can make analytics knowledge readily available and modifiable for future use and problem-solving by analysts and other stakeholders. In the context of our work, we organise analytics knowledge around the concept of a research variable, which analysts often use when defining and proving a hypothesis. By focusing on such a concept, this platform is particularly suited to develop empirical data analytics applications in any domain. This paper presents the architecture of this platform, including the knowledge base and the Application Programming Interface (API) layer. Capabilities of this platform are illustrated through a software prototype and a use case on property price prediction across Sydney, Australia.