Semantic layer
Encyclopedia
A semantic layer is a business representation of corporate data
that helps end users access data autonomously using common business terms. Developed and patented by Business Objects, it maps complex data into familiar business terms such as product, customer, or revenue to offer a unified, consolidated view of data across the organization.
By using common business terms, rather than data language, to access, manipulate, and organize information, it simplifies the complexity of business data. These business terms are stored as objects in a universe, accessed through business views.
Universes enable business users to access and analyze data stored in a relational database and OLAP cube
s. This is claimed to be core business intelligence (BI) technology that frees users from IT while ensuring correct results.
Business Views is a multi-tier system that is designed to enable companies to build comprehensive and specific business object
s that help report designers and end users access the information they require. Business Views is intended to enable people to add the necessary business context to their data island
s and link them into a single organized Business View for their organization.
Data
The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...
that helps end users access data autonomously using common business terms. Developed and patented by Business Objects, it maps complex data into familiar business terms such as product, customer, or revenue to offer a unified, consolidated view of data across the organization.
By using common business terms, rather than data language, to access, manipulate, and organize information, it simplifies the complexity of business data. These business terms are stored as objects in a universe, accessed through business views.
Universes enable business users to access and analyze data stored in a relational database and OLAP cube
OLAP cube
An OLAP cube is a data structure that allows fast analysis of data. It can also be defined as the capability of manipulating and analyzing data from multiple perspectives...
s. This is claimed to be core business intelligence (BI) technology that frees users from IT while ensuring correct results.
Business Views is a multi-tier system that is designed to enable companies to build comprehensive and specific business object
Business object
A business object is a type of an intelligible entity being an actor inside the business layer in an n-layered architecture of object-oriented computer programs....
s that help report designers and end users access the information they require. Business Views is intended to enable people to add the necessary business context to their data island
Data island
A data island is a data store, such as on a PDA or other computing device, that has non-existent or limited external connectivity. This limits the ability of the user to synchronize with or copy the data to other devices...
s and link them into a single organized Business View for their organization.