Augmenting the Knowledge Pyramid with Unconventional Data and Advanced Analytics

The volume, variety, and high availability of data backing decision support systems have impacted on business intelligence, the discipline providing strategies to transform raw data into decision-making insights. Such transformation is usually abstracted in the "knowledge pyramid", where data collected from the real world are processed into meaningful patterns. In this context, volume, variety, and data availability have opened for challenges in augmenting the knowledge pyramid. On the one hand, the volume and variety of unconventional data (i.e., unstructured non-relational data generated by heterogeneous sources such as sensor networks) demand novel and type-specific data management, integration, and analysis techniques. On the other hand, the high availability of unconventional data is increasingly attracting data scientists with high competence in the business domain but low competence in computer science and data engineering; enabling effective participation requires the investigation of new paradigms to drive and ease knowledge extraction. The goal of this thesis is to augment the knowledge pyramid from two points of view, namely, by including unconventional data and by providing advanced analytics. As to unconventional data, we focus on mobility data and on the privacy issues related to them by providing (de-)anonymization models. As to analytics, we introduce a higher abstraction level than writing formal queries. Specifically, we design advanced techniques that allow data scientists to explore data either by expressing intentions or by interacting with smart assistants in hand-free scenarios.