Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

XML content warehousing: Improving sociological studies of mailing lists and web data

In this paper, we present the guidelines for an XML-based approach for the sociological study of Web data such as the analysis of mailing lists or databases available online. The use of an XML warehouse is a flexible solution for storing and processing this kind of data. We propose an implemented solution and show possible applications with our case study of profiles of experts involved in W3C standard-setting activity. We illustrate the sociological use of semi-structured databases by presenting our XML Schema for mailing-list warehousing. An XML Schema allows many adjunctions or crossings of data sources, without modifying existing data sets, while allowing possible structural evolution. We also show that the existence of hidden data implies increased complexity for traditional SQL users. XML content warehousing allows altogether exhaustive warehousing and recursive queries through contents, with far less dependence on the initial storage. We finally present the possibility of exporting the data stored in the warehouse to commonly-used advanced software devoted to sociological analysis

An Open Source Based Data Warehouse Architecture to Support Decision Making in the Tourism Sector

In this paper an alternative Tourism oriented Data Warehousing architecture is proposed which makes use of the most recent free and open source technologies like Java, Postgresql and XML. Such architecture's aim will be to support the decision making process and giving an integrated view of the whole Tourism reality in an established context (local, regional, national, etc.) without requesting big investments for getting the necessary software.Tourism, Data warehousing architecture

Enterprise modeling:process and REA value chain perspective

The paper focuses on enterprise business value chain modeling as an alternative to business process modeling. Well known REA methodology proposed by McCarthy and Geerts is used as the basic modeling framework. The research presented in the paper results in a generic semantic enterprise model using REA ontology. This rather static model is then converted into UML activity, sequence and state diagrams thus achieving dynamic view of the REA model. The dynamic REA view connects the process model and the value chain perspectives. It is shown that by using REA model transition called dynamization not only process models at task level can be achieved but also a consistency check of the REA model can be accomplished. By means of step by step value chain modeling of the enterprise a consistent process model can be reached preserving all advantages of the typical business process modeling methodsProcess model; Value chain model; REA; Production planning