The mobility sector plays a critical role in modern societies, encompassing diverse types of movement for both tourism and work-related purposes. Moreover, this sector is linked with the current ability to widely generate real-time data, providing valuable information that can be leveraged for analytics and informed decision-making. However, extracting actionable insights remains challenging due to the pronounced heterogeneity of data sources and the often unreliable nature of traditional data exchange environments. Data spaces have emerged as a solution to these challenges, providing secure and governed environments for inter-organizational data sharing while ensuring that data owners retain full sovereignty over what they provide. Specifically, data spaces enable secure collaborations between consumers, who need to exploit their data, and providers, who offer value-added services to support decision-making processes. Nonetheless, despite their potential, research on data spaces is still in its early stages, and there is no clear consensus on the core concepts that underpin their practical implementation. Therefore, we first conduct a comprehensive literature review to design an architecture for data spaces and then we present the implementation of this architecture in a mobility data space. Our case study demonstrates the practical applicability of data spaces in the mobility domain, illustrating how they can be used not only to activate datasets but also to enable value-added services built upon those data, such as interactive dashboards. The results show that data spaces offer a viable approach for effectively leveraging mobility data, supporting both operational optimization and strategic decision-making in transportation services.

Dashboards are popular tools for presenting key insights to decision-makers by translating large volumes of data into clear information. However, while individual visualizations may effectively answer specific questions, they often fail to connect in a way that conveys the overall narrative , leaving decision-makers without a cohesive understanding of the area under analysis. This paper presents a novel methodology for the systematic design of holistic dashboards, moving from analytical requirements to storytelling dashboards. Our approach ensures that all visualizations are aligned with the analytical goals of decision-makers. It includes several key steps: capturing analytical requirements through the i* framework; structuring and refining these requirements into a tree model to reflect the decision-maker’s mental analysis; identifying and preparing relevant data; capturing the key concepts and relationships for the composition of the cohesive storytelling dashboard through a novel storytelling conceptual model; finally, implementing and integrating the visualizations into the dashboard, ensuring coherence and alignment with the decision-maker’s needs. Our methodology has been applied in real-world industrial environments. We evaluated its impact through a controlled experiment. The findings show that storytelling dashboards significantly improve data interpretation , reduce misinterpretations, and enhance the overall user experience compared to traditional dashboards.

Abstract NoSQL technologies have become a common component in many information systems and software applications. These technologies are focused on performance, enabling scalable processing of large volumes of structured and unstructured data. Unfortunately, most developments over NoSQL technologies consider security as an afterthought, putting at risk personal data of individuals and potentially causing severe economic loses as well as reputation crisis. In order to avoid these situations, companies require an approach that introduces security mechanisms into their systems without scrapping already in-place solutions to restart all over again the design process. Therefore, in this paper we propose the first modernization approach for introducing security in NoSQL databases, focusing on access control and thereby improving the security of their associated information systems and applications. Our approach analyzes the existing NoSQL solution of the organization, using a domain ontology to detect sensitive information and creating a conceptual model of the database. Together with this model, a series of security issues related to access control are listed, allowing database designers to identify the security mechanisms that must be incorporated into their existing solution. For each security issue, our approach automatically generates a proposed solution, consisting of a combination of privilege modifications, new roles and views to improve access control. In order to test our approach, we apply our process to a medical database implemented using the popular document-oriented NoSQL database, MongoDB. The great advantages of our approach are that: (1) it takes into account the context of the system thanks to the introduction of domain ontologies, (2) it helps to avoid missing critical access control issues since the analysis is performed automatically, (3) it reduces the effort and costs of the modernization process thanks to the automated steps in the process, (4) it can be used with different NoSQL document-based technologies in a successful way by adjusting the metamodel, and (5) it is lined up with known standards, hence allowing the application of guidelines and best practices.

Big Data constitutes an opportunity for companies to empower their analysis. However, at the moment there is no standard way for approaching Big Data projects. This, coupled with the complex nature of Big Data, is the cause that many Big Data projects fail or rarely obtain the expected return of investment. In this paper, we present a methodology to tackle Big Data projects in a systematic way, avoiding the aforementioned problems. To this end, we review the state of the art, identifying the most prominent problems surrounding Big Data projects, best practices and methods. Then, we define a methodology describing step by step how these techniques could be applied and combined in order to tackle the problems identified and increase the success rate of Big Data projects.

The huge amount of information available and its heterogeneity has surpassed the capacity of current data management technologies. Dealing with huge amounts of structured and unstructured data, often referred as Big Data, is a hot research topic and a technological challenge. In this paper, the authors present an approach aimed to enable OLAP queries over different, heterogeneous, data sources. Their approach is based on a MapReduce paradigm, which integrates different formats into the recent RDF Data Cube format. The benefits of their approach are that it is capable of querying different sources of information, while maintaining at the same time, an integrated, comprehensive view of the data available. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the implementation challenges that such approach presents. Furthermore, the approach is evaluated in detail by means of a case study.

In data warehouse (DW) development, a series of mappings must be specified between user concepts and data source elements, in order to identify which sources must undergo an integration process. Until now, these mappings are either assumed to be implied by name matching or identified according to the designer's experience. Then, the result is implemented as Extraction/Transformation/Loading (ETL) processes. Since ETL processes relate elements at the logical level, designers cannot adequately analyze how a change in requirements or in the data sources affects the analysis capabilities. Furthermore, this approach makes it difficult to perform incremental changes in DW design, requiring in some cases to perform the whole analysis again. In this paper we present a set of semantic mappings that relate user concepts specified by requirements to those obtained from data sources. In turn, this allows us to accurately identify how any potential change affects the different structures and ETL processes. As a DW evolves over time, our approach easily allows us to incorporate new concepts, as well as any change introduced at requirements or data sources into the DW repository with no need to redesign the whole DW. In order to show the application of our proposal, we show a real case study focusing on the Digital library of the University of Alicante.