Bridging the Gap between Data Warehouses and Organizations

Data Warehouse (DWH) systems are used by decision makers for performance measurement and decision support. Currently the main focus of the DWH research field is not as much on the interaction of the DWH with the organization, its context and the way it supports the organization’s strategic goals, as on database issues. The aim of my thesis is to emphasize and describe the relationship between the DWH and the organization with conceptual models, and to use this knowledge to support data interpretation with business metadata. 1 Problem Statement and Research Question Data Warehouse (DWH) systems represent a single source of information to analyze the development and results of an organization[1]. Measures such as the number of transactions per customer or the increase of sales during a promotion are used to recognize warning signs and to decide on future investments with regard to the strategic goals of the organization. Currently, the main focus of the DWH research field is on database issues, such as view maintenance, aggregation of data, indexing, data quality, or schema integration[2]. What has not yet been considered appropriately is the context of the DWH, its interaction with the organization and the way it supports the organization’s strategic goals. The conceptual models in Data Warehousing are strongly data-orientated[3] and do not allow for formally describing DWH context. Models that describe the DWH from various viewpoints, including an outside view of the DWH system, its environment and expected usage, are missing. Moreover, eventhough the data in the DWH by its very nature has to be closely related to the concerns of the organization, current DWHs also lack sufficient business metadata that would inform users about the organizational context and implications of what they are analyzing[4]. This PhD proposal targets the relationship between the DWH and the organization with two interrelated research questions: ⋆ This research has been funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture, and the European Social Fund (ESF) under grant 31.963/46VII/9/2002. How can the relationship between the Data Warehouse and the structure, behavior, and goals of the organization. (1) be formally described? (2) support the interpretation of data? Section 2 describes the research goals and the research field, followed by the expected results and their evaluation in Sect. 3, the contribution and beneficiaries of the expected results in Sect. 4, and a time plan and potential risks in Sect. 5. Section 6 describes the preliminary results achieved so far, followed by related work (Sect. 7), and a conclusion (Sect. 8). 2 Research Goals, Field, and Scope I address the research questions stated in Sect. 1 with two goals: 1) Development of a Conceptual Modeling Language. Diagrams that show how the organization is related to the DWH will be developed, to make it possible to model how the organization interacts with the DWH, and how its structure and behavior are mirrored by the DWH (data) structure. 2) Creation of Business Metadata. Knowledge about the organization, captured in an enterprise model, will be linked to the DWH by means of model weaving [5] and used to gain business metadata. Business metadata describes the business context of the data, its purpose, relevance, and potential use[4]. These goals represent different ways of applying the same knowledge about the relationship between the DWH and the organization, and they achieve different contributions (see Sect. 4). Because this thesis applies modeling techniques to the DWH as the application area, it positions itself in a multidisciplinary research field between Model Engineering and Data Warehousing, as visualized in Fig. 1.