X-warehousing: An XML-based approach for warehousing complex data

Abstract

XML is suitable for structuring complex data coming from different sources and supported by heterogeneous formats. It allows a flexible formalism capable to represent and store different types of data. Therefore, the importance of integrating XML documents in data warehouses is becoming increasingly high. In this paper, we propose an XML-based methodology, named X-Warehousing, which designs warehouses at a logical level, and populates them with XML documents at a physical level. Our approach is mainly oriented to users analysis objectives expressed according to an XML Schema and merged with XML data sources. The resulted XML Schema represents the logical model of a data warehouse. Whereas, XML documents validated against the analysis objectives populate the physical model of the data warehouse, called the XML cube. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.