A DATA WAREHOUSE SOLUTION FOR E-GOVERNMENT

ABSTRACT The eGovMon Data Warehouse (eGovMon DW) is built as a data repository for eGovernment services benchmarking results. We propose a DW architecture with open source business intelligence technologies for eGovernment. This DW architecture uses PostgreSQL as the DBMS, eGovernment operational system as the data source, and a right-time ETL tool to populate the data. Through this proposal, we give the potential research interests and issues for our future work. Keywords: eGovMon, Data Warehouse, ETL, DW architecture 1. INTRODUCTION The term of Business Intelligence (BI) is defined as the technologies, applications and practices that collect, integrate, analyze and present large amounts of data from data warehouse and extract useful knowledge from it [4]. The objective of using BI is to improve the timeliness and quality of the input to the decision process. For example, the world's largest retailer - Wal-Mart use their business intelligence system to attain the products in stock, predict retail marketing trends and make marketing decisions. A Data Warehouse (DW), the information source and basic of business intelligence, is defined as "a subject-oriented, non-volatile, time-variant repository" [2]. It provides a single platform for an enterprise to make a plan and decision on the data analysis of integrated history data. The technologies of business intelligence encompass a series of tools, architectures, information services and communication infrastructures that are useful for the data integration and analysis from heterogeneous data sources. Much often the business intelligence is characterized by the widely use of business intelligence tools. In the commercial world, business intelligence tools and technologies have come to their maturity after years' development. Many BI vendors not only give their own business intelligence tools but provide their business intelligence solutions as well, such as IBM, SAP, Business Objects, Cognos etc. However, in contrast with the commercial world, the use of business intelligence tools is still not very common in open source area, and not to mention complete business intelligence solutions. Although an increasing number of open source tools have been developed in recent years, most of them are still used in stand-alone in software development, other than in a full BI solution. This might be due to the reasons that, unlike the commercial tools having the full features required by the business intelligence and providing good technical support, many open source tools cannot be put into use immediately, instead, they might need to be intimately tailored and customized to the distinctive needs and requirements of the business. The main reason, however, is that open source business intelligence is still at the beginning phase of its development so that it still need several years to grow into maturity. Nevertheless, the benefit of open source business intelligence is obvious, such as its low-cost, manageable size, flexibility and reducing the dependence on software vendors, which make it to be a valuable alternative to the traditional business intelligence solutions. The investigation in section 2.1 evidences the open source tools are in bloom over the past few years. We can expect that in the next few years this trend will continue and will concentrate more research interests and efforts in this area [3]. In this paper, an open source business intelligence solution is proposed for the data warehouse of eGovMon project [1]. The construction of this data warehouse is to store the benchmarking eGovernment services results in four observatories: