Data Warehouse Architecture and Quality: Impact and Open Challenges

Abstract

The CAiSE 98 paper "Architecture and Quality in Data Warehouses" and its expanded journal version [18] was the first to add a Zachman-like [37] explicit conceptual enterprise modeling perspective to the architecture of data warehouses. Until then, data warehouses were just seen as collections of-typically multidimensional and historized-materialized views on relational tables, without consideration of modeling of the (business) concepts underlying their structure. The paper pointed out that this additional conceptual perspective was not just necessary for a truly semantic data integration but also a prerequisite for bringing the then very active data warehouse movement together with another topic of quickly growing importance, that of data quality. We were happy to see the citation and industrial uptake success of this paper as it played a central role in our European IST basic research project "Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality (DWQ)". Indeed, the paper was the first in a series of three CAiSE papers from 1998 to 2000 all three of which were selected as "best" CAiSE papers for expanded journal publication in Information Systems and