The Conceptual Integration Modeling Framework: Abstracting from the Multidimensional Model

Data warehouses are overwhelmingly built through a bottom-up process, which starts with the identification of sources, continues with the extraction and transformation of data from these sources, and then loads the data into a set of data marts according to desired multidimensional relational schemas. End user business intelligence tools are added on top of the materialized multidimensional schemas to drive decision making in an organization. Unfortunately, this bottom-up approach is costly both in terms of the skilled users needed and the sheer size of the warehouses. This paper proposes a top-down framework in which data warehousing is driven by a conceptual model. The framework offers both design time and run time environments. At design time, a business user first uses the conceptual modeling language as a multidimensional object model to specify what business information is needed; then she maps the conceptual model to a pre-existing logical multidimensional representation. At run time, a system will transform the user conceptual model together with the mappings into views over the logical multidimensional representation. We focus on how the user can conceptually abstract from an existing data warehouse, and on how this conceptual model can be mapped to the logical multidimensional representation. We also give an indication of what query language is used over the conceptual model. Finally, we argue that our framework is a step along the way to allowing automatic generation of the data warehouse.