Business Objects Masher – March 31, 2007

A “mashup” is a way of combining multiple service APIs on the Internet into a single application. Mashups use public or private APIs on the Internet as resources for combining and presenting information in novel derivative ways that can be reused easily. Business Objects Masher integrates the power of Web application mashup visualizations into the simple graphical user interface of Web Intelligence so that the ordinary business intelligence (BI) user can easily combine these visualization resources with data warehouse and other internal BI information. Masher includes a graph server with an extended set of chart types and pre-built access to Google Map views.

Whether the mashups display store locations, gasoline prices, or time and weather on a map, it's the combination of services and data that enables new BI solutions. Examples of mashup resources of relevance to BI applications include Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. The BI administrator controls which mashups are made available to business intelligence users. This download includes both the software and documentation needed to set up and use external visualization resources within Web Intelligence documents.

How Can Business Objects Masher help with Business Intelligence solutions?

Business Objects Masher makes it uniquely easy to create and use external graphics resources within Web business intelligence documents. Web Intelligence enables mash up by allowing report designers to insert pre-built pieces of DHTML and JavaScript into their reports. The previous version of Business Objects Masher exposed this capability and provided some tools and guidelines to take advantage of it. Business Objects Masher breaks new ground by introducing the ability to tightly integrate BI context with external mashup capabilities through a “mashup template.” A mashup template natively accesses BI contexts and multiple values, just like native Web Intelligence charts, and report designers can now use existing BI workflows with external visualization applications through these templates without any knowledge of DHTML or JavaScript. For example, to create the map report below, showing different maps for each section and displaying multiple values per map, the report designer simply selects the “Google Map” template from the chart and table types catalog.

Graphics Masher

Mashup template designers use JavaScript coding to define their visualization templates and publish them in a catalog so that report designers can easily access and use them. In addition to the pre-built Google Map template, Masher also includes a built-in graph server with an extended suite of chart templates for BI use (sampling of the available charts shown below). Third parties interested in visualization are invited to publish their own templates on the Labs zone by submitting a Masher template to the Labs.

Graphics Masher

Enjoy! We hope you use this prototype to discover the many ways mashups can change the way people consume information. Please give us feedback to make sure we know how you're using this and what else you would like to see it do in the future. And remember, this is a prototype only and NOT for use in production environments.