Automatic validation of requirements to support multidimensional design

摘要

It is widely accepted that the conceptual schema of a data warehouse must be structured according to the multidimensional model. Moreover, it has been suggested that the ideal scenario for deriving the multidimensional conceptual schema of the data warehouse would consist of a hybrid approach (i.e., a combination of data-driven and requirement-driven paradigms). Thus, the resulting multidimensional schema would satisfy the end-user requirements and would be conciliated with the data sources. Most current methods follow either a data-driven or requirement-driven paradigm and only a few use a hybrid approach. Furthermore, hybrid methods are unbalanced and do not benefit from all of the advantages brought by each paradigm.In this paper we present our approach for multidimensional design. The most relevant step in our framework is Multidimensional Design by Examples (MDBE), which is a novel method for deriving multidimensional conceptual schemas from relational sources according to end-user requirements. MDBE introduces several advantages over previous approaches, which can be summarized as three main contributions. (i) The MDBE method is a fully automatic approach that handles and analyzes the end-user requirements automatically. (ii) Unlike data-driven methods, we focus on data of interest to the end-user. However, the user may not be aware of all the potential analyses of the data sources and, in contrast to requirement-driven approaches, MDBE can propose new multidimensional knowledge related to concepts already queried by the user. (iii) Finally, MDBE proposes meaningful multidimensional schemas derived from a validation process. Therefore, the proposed schemas are sound and meaningful.